I HAVK ONLY MYSELF 
 TO JKLAMK 
 
 KI.I/ABKTH BIBESCO
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Mrs. Ben B. Lin<5sey
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF 
 TO BLAME 
 
 ELIZABETH BIBESCO
 
 I HAVE ONLY 
 MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 BY 
 ELIZABETH BIBESCO 
 
 NEW ^tar YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 
 Copyright, 1921, 
 By George H. Dor an Company 
 
 Copyright, 1921, By The McCall Company 
 
 Copyright, 1921, By The Republic Publishing Company, 
 
 Incorporated 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 TO 
 
 MY HUSBAND 
 
 1106234
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME .... 11 
 
 II TOMORROW 2 4 
 
 III "THE WEB" 31 
 
 IV AN ORDINARY MAN 39 
 
 V THE GESTURE 46 
 
 VI CYCLAMEN 5 1 
 
 VII THE DREAM 57 
 
 VIII THE FAREWELL 61 
 
 IX TOUT COMPRENDRB 67 
 
 X THREE LOVE LETTERS 86 
 
 XI THE SUCCESSOR 94 
 
 XII As IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 109 
 
 XIII THE OLD STORY 112 
 
 XIV THE PILGRIMAGE 124 
 
 XV THE BALL 146 
 
 XVI FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE . . . 153
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF 
 TO BLAME
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF 
 TO BLAME 
 
 i 
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 I HAVE only myself to blame." She had said it 
 to herself so often that, once she set the words 
 going they went on repeating themselves automatic- 
 ally till she forced herself to turn them off as if they 
 were a gramophone record. In a way they had ceased 
 to mean anything, but she tried to give their sense 
 back to them by repeating each word slowly, and 
 forcibly concentrating her mind. 
 
 "Myself, myself, myself," she said. Self-accusa- 
 tion had become her one form of relaxation. 
 
 There had been so many reasons why she 
 shouldn't marry him, and only one reason why she 
 should if it could be called a reason. 
 
 She was the first person he had ever loved. He 
 had trembled when he touched her. His spasms 
 of passion had been like spasms of pain, his face con- 
 torted and his voice rough, and then there had fol- 
 lowed intervals of wretched shyness. When he had 
 
 it
 
 12 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 thought of possessing her he had become a saint 
 waiting for a divine manifestation. It was this 
 transforming of an ordinary physiological fact into 
 a miracle that won her. She could see inevitability 
 in desire, in triumph, in failure. Hers was the 
 man's attitude. He lifted her into the region of the 
 ridiculous and the sublime. 
 
 "Your privacy is sacred," he said. "Everything 
 that you give me is divine. But it is a gift. I 
 have no rights." 
 
 She could not resist the thought of being married 
 to a monk. He had made no vows concerning her 
 spirit, her mind, her habits. These he was free to 
 violate. Here he must insist on asserting himself. 
 
 She hadn't thought of that. . . . 
 
 All her friends tried to dissuade her. They told 
 her some delicately, some violently things about 
 him that she knew better than they did. 
 
 "I like his attitude tow.ards women," she some- 
 times explained wearily. 
 
 "My dear ! What a reason ! You of all people." 
 
 "Just so," she said. 
 
 Now there was a conspiracy of silence. No one 
 said anything ever. 
 
 "My life has become a sort of solitary confine- 
 ment," she laughed drearily. 
 
 Their tact and her loyalty barred the doors. 
 
 And he was a success! He was a member of
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 13 
 
 Parliament and a writer of magazine stories. Of 
 most of them she was avowedly the heroine. He 
 dexterously hinted it in interviews and blatantly pro- 
 claimed it in conversation graciously, a furnace of 
 rage burning behind her eyes, she accepted it as a 
 toast. One of his most successful stories had been 
 called "Countess Cherie," and thus his friends play- 
 fully addressed her. It branded her, and she was 
 glad to be bathed by her friends with the cool water 
 of her own Christian name. 
 
 And all the time she was bound to him by some 
 indefinable physical tie not her passion for him, 
 but his reverence for her or rather for her body. 
 She wondered if what she gave into his tender deli- 
 cate keeping atoned for the things he stole and broke. 
 
 To-night every nerve was crying out "no" while 
 those eternal six words "I have only myself to 
 blame," hummed an accompaniment. 
 
 She was waiting for him in her charming boudoir. 
 He had come in late from the House and was dress- 
 ing for dinner he always dressed for dinner. 
 
 In a detached way she was enjoying the firelight 
 and her own apricot tea-gown, but she was too much 
 annoyed with him for changing to enjoy either very 
 much. Why couldn't he have come in as he was 1 ? 
 
 The door opened and he appeared very immacu- 
 late. She would have felt more forgiving had he 
 been more untidy.
 
 14 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "I must apologise for having kept you waiting." 
 
 "You shouldn't have changed." 
 
 "I disapprove of a man who thinks he can be as 
 dirty and untidy as he likes, simply because he is at 
 home. Besides," he took her hand and kissed it, 
 "I like to show some consideration for my wife." 
 
 How well she knew this comedy of formality that 
 was his idea of fine manners. 
 
 Dinner was announced. He gave her his arm. 
 
 "A very good wine, my Catherine." He sipped 
 his claret. 
 
 "It is always like that. Everything that belongs 
 to him he consecrates by possessing it," she thought 
 angrily. 
 
 He enjoyed the dinner and his own conversation. 
 By including her in his complacency he did his duty 
 to his wife. 
 
 "I met Henry Donald to-day and asked him to 
 come in after dinner. He is staying the night at 
 his club instead of going back to the country." 
 
 "No wonder, with a wife like that to go back to." 
 
 "Mrs. Donald is a friend of mine." He had got 
 his stern smile-proof look. 
 
 "Possibly. But hardly a favourite of his. I 
 can't think why he married her, though I suppose 
 her two thousand pounds a year made a great differ- 
 ence to him at that time."
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 15 
 
 "Catherine, I forbid you to say such coarse, cruel 
 things. Henry is devoted to his wife." 
 
 "Well, if he were it would be to his discredit." 
 
 She realised what a particularly silly argument it 
 was. 
 
 "I could almost hate you when you talk like that." 
 
 "And I have no redeeming two thousand a year." 
 
 His look of horror disarmed her a little. 
 
 "Don't look so horrified. It would be very nice 
 if I had." 
 
 "I hope I am able to support my wife." 
 
 "I think you stand her wonderfully well, on the 
 whole." 
 
 "That was not what I meant." She had made 
 him too cross to be bantered back into sunniness. 
 
 "Don't you wish she spent a little more on her 
 clothes? Her shoes always look as if they were 
 recommended by a chiropodist." 
 
 He did not smile. 
 
 "Mrs. Donald is a good, loyal, simple woman. 
 As the wife of a very dear friend of mine she is 
 sacred to me." 
 
 "Well, I could wish for his sake that she were a 
 little more secular and alluring." 
 
 "Catherine," his voice was firm, "there are cer- 
 tain things that I have the right to exact from my 
 wife : one is that she should keep her bitter tongue off 
 my friends."
 
 l6 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "And their wives and their cousins and their mis- 
 tresses." 
 
 "Catherine!" 
 
 "Didn't you know that people had mistresses'?" 
 
 "Mr. Donald !" The announcement was a relief. 
 
 "Good evening, Mr. Donald. I am so glad to see 
 you." 
 
 "You have come just in time for some port. A 
 most excellent wine. You will not be allowed to 
 smoke until you have finished it." 
 
 Horace was in his element. He revelled in his 
 duties as a host. He knew what wine should be 
 drunk with which fish, and the Lord Chamberlain 
 himself had not a more accurate knowledge of the 
 laws of precedence. He enjoyed offering his arm 
 to the lady of highest rank, even if she were one 
 of his wife's supercilious relations. He liked the 
 sight of diamonds and the sound of titles though 
 fortunately he had never connected these pleasures 
 with their source. Above all, he loved the moment 
 when, alone with the men, he could push round the 
 decanters, offer cigars of varying lengths and equal 
 though different perfection, and dominate the con- 
 versation. He liked to tell a good story and even to 
 listen to one. His love of a prompt retort was not 
 confined to those he made himself. He was genu- 
 inely fond of his fellow-creatures, loyal to his friends 
 and ready to do a good turn to anyone. He had a
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME I'J 
 
 rigid sense of honour which consisted of variations 
 on the theme of "You should never hit a man when 
 he is down" ; "You should never question a servant" ; 
 "You should not look at the envelopes of your wife's 
 letters." When he lost ^game he was always the 
 first to congratulate the winner with the invariable 
 formula "The best man won." Victorious, he never 
 omitted to say "You were a bit off colour, old chap," 
 to his defeated opponent. He preferred cricket and 
 rugby to lawn tennis and golf. "Team work, there's 
 nothing like it," was his watchword. He believed in 
 a judicious mixture of armaments and economy, im- 
 perialism and free trade. He believed in the weak- 
 ness of women, he believed in not believing in God. 
 He was shocked by corporal punishment and pros- 
 titution, and he had never quite been able to make 
 up his mind about vivisection. He thought Freud 
 an impostor. He loved animals, he was on the wine 
 committee of his club. He was a good son, a good 
 brother, a good husband, a good citizen and a good 
 friend. 
 
 Of all these things Catherine was devastatingly 
 conscious. She watched the two men and listened 
 to them in a desultory dispassionate way. Their 
 conversation was so full of nicknames that it re- 
 minded her of the social letter in the "Tatler." 
 Some of them she suspected were inaccurate. Unim- 
 peachable Johns and Williams became Jacks and
 
 l8 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 Bills. A well-known feminist whose "Margaret" 
 was a trumpet call to continents emerged from a 
 wrapping of "Maggie." The Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer as "Toddles" was revealed by subsequent 
 side-lights. "Why should I mind 1 ? What does it 
 matter? Why do I listen?" thought Catherine. 
 "My chatterbox is very silent." Horace laid his 
 hand on hers, "and she knows she only enjoys her- 
 self when she is talking a lot." 
 
 "Don't mind him, Mrs. Little. He is jealous of 
 your superior conversational gifts." 
 
 Don't mind him; don't mind him, she reflected. 
 What excellent advice. She smiled. 
 
 "How is your wife?" she inquired. 
 
 "Much better, Mrs. Little, much better, thank 
 you. She is looking forward to paying her respects 
 to you when she comes to town." 
 
 Why did he keep repeating her name like a nursery 
 governess? 
 
 "And the children?" she persisted. 
 
 "Very well, thank you. Charley-boy is going to 
 school next term." 
 
 "How dreadful for his poor mother." 
 
 "Well, it will be rather a wrench for her, Mrs. 
 Little, but the time has come for him to be made a 
 man of." 
 
 There was a pause. Catherine thought, "Why 
 does one always want to listen and to interrupt at
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 1Q 
 
 the same time if one is amused, or to do neither if 
 one isn't?" 
 
 Horace thought, "She always tries to make my 
 friends seem dull." 
 
 Henry thought, "Charming feminine woman, 
 Mrs. Little, but dashed if I've ever seen any of that 
 wit people talk about." 
 
 "Shall you send your daughter to school, too, or 
 have a governess?" Catherine painfully pursued 
 the topic of the young Donalds' education which 
 interested no one, not even their father. 
 
 "It's a very difficult question, isn't it? Rather 
 lonely for an only girl and yet one doesn't want to 
 send her to a school where she might er hear 
 things." 
 
 The hesitation and the blush were too much for 
 Catherine. 
 
 "You ought to talk to her quite frankly," she 
 said firmly, "facts are only disgusting if they are 
 hinted at and sniggered at and veiled, so that they 
 become the centre of perverted imaginings and igno- 
 rant curiosity." 
 
 Horace was horrified by the turn the conversation 
 had taken. 
 
 "By the way," he intervened hastily ("what way," 
 she wondered) "I met your uncle Wrotham in the 
 street." 
 
 "Who with?"
 
 2O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Miss Gardiner." 
 
 "A sweetly pretty girl." Henry was glad to be 
 off the rocks. "I saw Lord Wrotham escort her 
 onto the terrace the other day. A charming picture 
 they made. He is a most magnificent looking man." 
 
 "They are certainly amazingly alike." 
 
 "They are surely not related?" Henry could 
 easily have graduated for the College of Heralds. 
 
 Catherine raised her eyebrows. "Oh, didn't you 
 know? She is his daughter." 
 
 "Really, Catherine, how can you talk in such a 
 disgusting way about your uncle." 
 
 Horace was furious. "But it isn't disgusting. 
 Uncle George lived with Mrs. Gardiner for years. 
 Everyone knows why shouldn't he, poor man? 
 His wife has been shut up as a lunatic for ages." 
 
 "She is still his wife in the eyes of the law." 
 
 "Really, Horace, considering that you don't be- 
 lieve in God you really have taken on all the intol- 
 erance of all the churches in the world." 
 
 Again they had reached an impasse. One of 
 Horace's rules of behaviour was "Never argue with 
 your wife in the company of a third person." He 
 couldn't begin a "by-the-way" again, and he was 
 profoundly grateful when Henry said: 
 
 "Life is full of tragedies. We should try to 
 judge charitably." 
 
 This unanswerable truth created a new silence,
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 21 
 
 broken first by Horace offering his guest a cigar, 
 and then by Catherine asking if the telephone rates 
 were really to be raised? 
 
 "I know I shall start talking about venereal 
 diseases if this atmosphere lasts much longer," she 
 said to herself. 
 
 At last Henry rose to say good-night. The relief 
 at his impending departure brought a rush of conver- 
 sation. Suddenly they were all full of things they 
 were longing to say. Speaking all together they 
 shouted one another down, laughing and talking 
 twenty to the dozen. Drowned in the noisy cordial- 
 ity of their good-byes, Henry took his departure. 
 Horace came back into the room and shut the door. 
 This, as his wife knew, was the herald of a scene. 
 Yawning and stretching herself, she set light to his 
 anger. "God, what an evening! I was too bored 
 even to listen to what I was saying myself." 
 
 "You were lucky. I unfortunately heard every 
 word you said." 
 
 "I must apologise for having been almost as dull 
 as Mr. Donald. Such is infection." 
 
 "Henry is an excellent fellow and a charming 
 companion. With your amiable desire to distress 
 and embarrass my friends I realise that you deliber- 
 ately chose to discuss such enthralling topics as the 
 sexual education of girls and your uncle's bastards." 
 
 "What extraordinary language you use about my
 
 22 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 poor cousins, but if I talked too much about my 
 family, I am sorry. It is a most tiresome habit." 
 
 Deliberately she was infuriating him, drawling at 
 him with perfect control of her temper. 
 
 "You will please realise that I am master in my 
 own house," he asserted irrelevantly. 
 
 "Of course, dear. Let us go to bed." 
 
 He strode to the door and locked it. 
 
 "Not until you have apologised." 
 
 "I apologise." She was smiling at him a calm, 
 amused smile. 
 
 He strode back to the door and unlocked it. 
 
 "Thank you." She bowed her head as she left the 
 room. The gesture of a queen in a carriage. He 
 was frustrated, impotent, furious. "She deserves to 
 be smacked/' he said to himself, and then remem- 
 bered that no man ever struck a woman. 
 
 She undressed and wondered whether he would 
 come up to bed. She felt very tired and the evening 
 had been a complete failure. She had behaved 
 childishly and in a way that she was forced to admit 
 was rapidly becoming characteristic. In a way 
 Henry ought to have helped them. She had abso- 
 lutely nothing to say to her husband when they 
 were alone. She heard Horace's footsteps on the 
 stairs. He paused and knocked at her door. 
 
 "You baby," he said, "how young you look with
 
 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAMii 23 
 
 your hair down. May I sit in your armchair for 
 a moment'?" 
 
 She pushed it nearer the fire and got on to his knee. 
 With the curling capacity of a cat she fitted herself 
 into his arms. Suddenly she began to cry. 
 
 "Horace," she said, "I'm so lonely, so terribly 
 lonely." 
 
 He kissed her and soothed her and mesmerised 
 her. Then he lifted her into bed. She dreamt that 
 she and Horace and Lord Wrotham and Miss 
 Gardiner and Freud were talking about girls' schools 
 and then Henry arrived, saying "Here is Toddles," 
 and Horace said, "We will not pollute this port 
 with smoke," and she answered, "I have only myself 
 to blame."
 
 II 
 
 TO-MORROW 
 
 half-hour of crowded anticipation, how 
 JL fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows ! 
 What you possess is not what you jingle in the pock- 
 ets of your memory, but the imaginings with which 
 you fill the spaces of the future. Reality can never 
 touch them, yet of such are the Kingdom of Life. 
 
 This was the moment she must enjoy. These 
 minutes before he arrived, when their glorious happy 
 hour together usually so unhappy when it came 
 was still to come. Once he is there she can hear 
 nothing but the clock ticking the beats of her heart, 
 tolling the knell of each minute. The past will 
 seem to be capturing the present at an overwhelming 
 rate. She can never enjoy being with him for the 
 knowledge that they will so soon be separated, 
 and what is worse, separate, walking down differ- 
 ent streets, talking to different people, thinking 
 different thoughts. Her heart will stop beating 
 when she sees him post a letter and realises that she 
 will never know what is in it. 
 
 But to-day must be perfect, it is the last time 
 for so long. She must try to keep calm and amus- 
 
 24
 
 TO-MORROW 25 
 
 ing and alluring, as she had been in the days before 
 she loved him, the days when he had loved her best. 
 She mustn't allow the edge to come from her nerves 
 into her voice; she mustn't make those desperate 
 irrelevant grabs at certainty. She begins to feel faint 
 and sick and too restless to sit down, and yet she 
 must be in a chair when he arrives and have some- 
 thing to hold on to, something to give her poise. 
 Every now and then she looks into a glass, but 
 can only see a white blur, and feeling the back 
 of her head with her hands, she detaches the hairs 
 she means to smooth. 
 
 She tries to focus her attention by nailing her 
 eyes on to her little silver feet. "I wonder if I am 
 looking pretty*?" she thinks, desperately; and still 
 more desperately, "I wonder if it matters'?" Every 
 noise becomes the noise of a taxi and real taxis 
 come rushing past. At last one stops she hears a 
 step on the staircase the bell goes through her like 
 an electric shock. ^' 
 
 He comes in and looks at her for a moment with- 
 out speaking. "You are looking very beautiful!" 
 Her eyes shine. She feels herself to be the incarna- 
 tion of beauty. "It's for you," she stops herself 
 from saying. She mustn't force things. He kisses 
 her hand. She feels so happy and at peace. The 
 clock has stopped. 
 
 "I oughtn't to have come," he says. "You said
 
 26 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 I was grumpy and gloomy the other day ; I am much 
 worse now. I don't know what has come over me." 
 
 She looks at him anxiously and fingers his sleeve. 
 
 "Have you a headache?" (She hopes he is ill.) 
 "Can I do anything for you?" 
 
 "Nothing, thank you." 
 
 She is chilled, he is silent. 
 
 And then: "Do you remember Jameson, that 
 archaeologist in Abyssinia?" She has forgotten 
 Jameson, but she hastily assents, trying to be nearer 
 him by this link in their pasts. "I met him to-day." 
 
 Jameson has become the centre of the universe. 
 She listens, to his voice really, but with the surface 
 of her intelligence she comments, in order to be the 
 wonderful listener he always praised. 
 
 Dinner is announced Jameson is abandoned. 
 
 She wants this meal to be a Holy Communion 
 between them. 
 
 He is happy now, talking, full of reminiscences 
 which usually begin with "You remember" (she 
 likes them to begin like that), though many of them 
 deal with times before she was born or before she 
 knew him only she can't admit that he was born 
 before she was or that there was a time when they 
 didn't know one another. 
 
 He is telling her a story about the East, but his 
 voice chloroforms her to what he is saying. "I 
 want to consult you." She is alert now, vitally
 
 TO-MORROW 27 
 
 interested. It is only on a very small point, but she 
 is glad to have had her advice asked. 
 
 Suddenly: "You look tired," he says. "I am 
 glad you are going to have a holiday." (A holiday !) 
 "To-morrow at this time you will be in the train. 
 Let me see, you ought just to have reached " 
 
 He becomes a map and a time-table. She shud- 
 ders. Why doesn't he say he is sorry she is going*? 
 How odd men are! 
 
 They go into the next room and she puts her head 
 on his shoulder, while half absently he strokes her 
 hair. He has never kissed her since she married, 
 though he once took her face in his hands and said : 
 "You make it so difficult for me," and, elated, she 
 had wondered how to make it much more difficult 
 still. 
 
 She wishes he would put his face near hers, and 
 comfort her and cosset her like a child just now 
 she only wants tenderness, not passion. 
 
 "When are you going to Abyssinia*?" she asks. 
 
 He tells her. 
 
 "Do you wish I were coming with you*?" 
 
 "No. It is no fit place for a woman." 
 
 "But if it were?" 
 
 "It would not be Abyssinia." 
 
 "Don't be so matter-of-fact." She could hit him. 
 
 "I told you I was no fit companion for anyone 
 to-night."
 
 28 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "But I'm not anyone." 
 
 "Not even for you, then." 
 
 She knows that she is going to give him an opening 
 to hurt her so she rushes back to Jameson. She is 
 determined to be brilliant and she succeeds. She 
 sees him laughing and thinking what wonderful com- 
 pany she is. As if she cared a damn! And it is 
 getting later and later, the whole evening slipping 
 away like this. 
 
 "Are you going to write to me*?" 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 "Long, intimate, indiscreet letters'?" 
 
 "You know what my letters are like. They never 
 fulfil any of your requirements, do they?" 
 
 "I don't think I get as good as I give." 
 
 "But, then, you are a born letter-writer." 
 
 "Do you remember the first letter I ever wrote 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "It was ages ago, just before I was married." 
 
 "It doesn't seem such ages to me." 
 
 "Ah, but you haven't married." 
 
 The thought gives her courage and happiness. 
 After all, he isn't married. 
 
 "I must be going," he says. "It has been a very 
 happy evening." (Happy!) 
 
 "Bless you, my dear." 
 
 He looks into her eyes and he goes.
 
 TO-MORROW 29 
 
 She undresses feverishly. How long will it take 
 him to get home? She takes up the receiver. No 
 reply. She waits an eternity. Five minutes. She 
 forces herself to wait another five. Then she tries 
 again. 
 
 "Is that you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I have rung up to say 'Good-night/ ' 
 
 "How nice of you !" 
 
 "I am very nice." 
 
 "I know." 
 
 Suddenly she feels at ease for the first time. Her 
 voice gurgles and bubbles. She tells him little 
 things that people said to her in shops. He laughs. 
 Their bodily separation has brought them together 
 again. Intimacy is enveloping them. She blesses 
 the telephone. 
 
 "I have got my light out, and you?" 
 
 "I am not undressed." 
 
 "Shall I see you again?" 
 
 "What time does your train go?" 
 
 "At one." 
 
 "Perhaps we might go for a drive together in the 
 morning?" 
 
 "Yes, do let's. Good-night, dearest; bless you." 
 
 Fancy her ringing oif first! She is frightened of 
 spoiling it. 
 
 "Bless you."
 
 3O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Say 'dearest/ " 
 
 "Dearest." 
 
 She is so happy, so radiantly happy, for after all 
 there is to-morrow, and to-morrow is bound to be 
 perfect. 
 
 "I won't wear my old coat and skirt to travel in," 
 she murmurs to herself till, her consciousness merg- 
 ing into dreams, she falls asleep.
 
 Ill 
 
 "THE WEB" 
 
 SHE drove into the little Westminster backwater 
 in which he lived. Sure as she had so often 
 been sure before that to-day she v/ould be courage- 
 ous and not sacrifice the hour to the moment or a 
 lifetime to the hour. What was the good of trying 
 not to hurt if the ultimate hurt she was bound to 
 inflict increased in proportion to the small wounds 
 she avoided"? She had no blind eye to which to 
 put her telescope. By experience she knew that 
 every time she tried to pay off some of her indebted- 
 ness by a gesture of tenderness she was in reality 
 increasing her liabilities. 
 
 To-day the little corner of Westminster that 
 she had always loved seemed more even than usual 
 to envelop her in their mutual intimacy. The 
 evening air was shot with red gold and the tree like 
 a giraffe, that she had often fondled with her eyes, 
 beckoned to her with irresistible self-confidence. 
 
 "The last door on the right," she said to the taxi, 
 
 :d to herself, "I won't look up. I will do nothing 
 sleading." She knew that he would be bending 
 t of the window, his eyes drawing her into his 
 house, his face lit up by the sight of her. 
 
 31 
 
 ;
 
 32 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 She rang the bell. "Perhaps he didn't hear the 
 taxi," she thinks, and she looks up to see. He is 
 watching her with a quiet, ecstatic look, while her 
 silver cloak entangles bits of the sunset. The old 
 housekeeper welcomes her lovingly. Here indeed 
 is the wife she would have chosen for her beloved 
 pampered young master. 
 
 He himself is standing at the top of the stairs. 
 "Helana! At last!" She is in his little room in 
 the middle of his slum of books. Red gold dust in 
 her eyes and a ridiculous irrelevant feeling of being 
 at home in her heart. 
 
 "How long have you been away? Five whole, 
 endless days empty of everything but my thoughts 
 of you." 
 
 "How well you talk." His phrasing has cooled 
 her. 
 
 His face changes. Cold, hard lines come out 
 everywhere. "You always manage to spoil every- 
 thing, don't you*?" 
 
 Desperately she clutches at her opportunity. "I 
 know I do always. It is dreadful. You don't know 
 how I hate to rain for your picnic." 
 
 "It is so easy for you not to. You are fighting 
 not me but yourself." 
 
 "I am not fighting anything not even my own 
 cowardice. Do you think I like making you un- 
 happy? Do you think it amuses me"? We just are
 
 THE WEB 33 
 
 hopelessly unsuited to one another. Do you seri- 
 ously think that you want a wife like me*?" 
 
 "Marriage will modify you." 
 
 "Marriage might modify me if I married the 
 right man. Marriage to you would bring out every- 
 thing you hate." 
 
 "Helena, do you realise that I love you*?" 
 
 As always before this real, undeniable, important, 
 impossible fact she stops. To her it is a brick wall 
 to be surmounted neither by argument that being 
 unconvincing nor surrender that being unattain- 
 able. She looks at him with wide, frightened eyes. 
 
 "Helena, you don't know what love means." 
 
 Again she snatches at her opportunity. "Of 
 course I don't. If I did I might want to marry 
 you." 
 
 "You love me, but you don't know it. You 
 fight it, you won't admit it. You let me love you. 
 You made me love you. What am I to think*?" 
 
 "Think the worst of me and let me go." 
 
 "I can't. You are as much mine as if you were 
 my wife." 
 
 She hates him for his assumptions and his cer- 
 tainties. How can she get away from him? 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Her voice is very low. "If you want me, I will 
 give myself to you."
 
 34 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "I want much more than that and much less 
 if you like." 
 
 She has keyed herself up to this supreme act of 
 escape. If only he lets her do this her sense of 
 honour will be satisfied and she will be free with 
 no more debts to haunt and entangle her. 
 
 How can she get him to accept? 
 
 "You talk about love," she says. "What a strange, 
 restricted growth it is with you. You don't know 
 what the real thing means, you who think passion 
 is bad taste because you are not tempted, you to 
 whom the physical side is a degrading extra." Her 
 words are deliberate and clipped like a box hedge. 
 She is ashamed bitterly ashamed but what else 
 can she do? 
 
 "Helena," his voice is rough, "be careful what 
 you say. Don't you think I want you, that I desire 
 you if that is the sort of language you like*?" 
 
 He has gripped her two arms. She bites her lip 
 and, shutting her eyes, waits. Suddenly he releases 
 her and turns away. She can hear his breath coming 
 in quick, uneven stabs. 
 
 "And yet you refuse me when I offer myself to 
 you?" 
 
 She says it very slowly in a low, caressing voice. 
 In her heart she knows that his valuation is the same 
 as hers only to him her gift would mean disillu- 
 sion and to her freedom.
 
 "THE WEB" 35 
 
 "I don't accept a debased currency." His voice is 
 like ice, and then passionately, "I hate you when 
 you talk like that." 
 
 "You don't think it like a lady?" 
 
 She remembers a hundred instances of his inso- 
 lent, moral magnificence. "You want me to sign 
 your name, to sit at the head of your table, to dazzle 
 your friends, to eclipse your sisters-in-law, to be a 
 mother to your children." 
 
 She is working herself up. 
 
 "Certainly, and I want you to be my wife, my 
 beloved my sweetheart." 
 
 His voice has suddenly melted, the glint has given 
 way to a glow. She feels battered by his logic and 
 his love and the reality of what he is saying. 
 
 "Luke, do you want me to marry you whether I 
 want to or not?" 
 
 "Yes. I mean to marry you." 
 
 At dinner they talk of other things. There is a 
 cushion at the back of her chair and flowers by her 
 plate and little things that she likes to eat. 
 
 She doesn't say much. Her head aches. 
 
 After dinner he makes her put her feet up and curl 
 into his sofa like a long stretched cat. 
 
 Very gently, very tenderly he puts his cool hand 
 on her forehead. He has always had that curiously 
 healing touch. He doesn't worry her or fuss her. 
 He never mentions a dangerous topic. Simply she
 
 36 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 has a feeling of relaxation as if she were in a warm 
 bath. A drowsy feeling of comfort comes over her. 
 He talks to her without waiting for or expecting 
 an answer. 
 
 Daylight seems to have faded before their eyes, 
 leaving a bright blue night with very yellow lights 
 shining out of windows and lamps. He has lit a 
 wood fire, which warms her eyes and gives a flicker- 
 ing unreality to the room. 
 
 "After all," she defends herself to herself, "no 
 one can make a scene by firelight." 
 
 He is stroking the creamy velvet of her dress and, 
 bending down with the ceremoniousness those flowers 
 demand, he smells the gardenias at her waist while 
 she notices that their white suede petals are shriv- 
 elling into yellow vellum. 
 
 The pearls at her neck have allowed little patches 
 of the fire to settle on them, and undoing their clasp 
 he lets them trickle through his fingers like sand. 
 Kissing her hand he gets to the heart of that faint 
 scent of hers that seems like the memory or the 
 echo of something forgotten. 
 
 She knows how he loves these things, the ever 
 old and the ever new delight that they are to him. 
 She tries to fight the anchored sense that is coming 
 over her with a question about some book. His 
 opinion on that, and indeed almost all subjects, is 
 valueless to her. It doesn't even interest her. But
 
 "THE WEB 37 
 
 to-night she asks only to be irritated, for some word 
 of his to let loose the things she has come to say. 
 He doesn't want to talk about a topic, but he reads 
 her a little poem, and a certain lilt in the meaningless 
 words lulls her into an even greater quiescence. 
 
 "I wonder if you yourself realise the magic of 
 your presence in this house," he says. 
 
 But it is not a question, and after saying it he is 
 silent. 
 
 It is ridiculous that she should like his talking like 
 that, and she likes it too when later he gives her a 
 wonderful description of what he would feel like 
 were she to fall asleep on his sofa. Her eyelids keep 
 closing as if he were mesmerising her, she is clutch- 
 ing at consciousness like a drowning woman, but the 
 water is very warm. 
 
 Suddenly something inside her capsizes. 
 
 "Luke, do you really want to marry me*?" 
 
 "I want your headache to go. We won't discuss 
 anything else." 
 
 The evening drifts into a happy little creek of 
 understanding. She has a feeling of blue air and 
 diamond decked water. She knows it is ridiculous, 
 the effects of a headache on her part and a little cal- 
 culated generosity on his. 
 
 She may not be taken in but she is taken. 
 
 At last she gets up to go.
 
 38 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Remember, I am waiting for you to give me your 
 headache." 
 
 "And nothing else?" She could hit herself for 
 saying it. 
 
 "That is all I am asking for to-night." 
 
 She drives away, forcing a retrospect of her eve- 
 ning into her soul like a hot iron. Always it is like 
 that. She gives way to the immediate, a desire to 
 make him happy or to be happy, an indulging in 
 the indulgence of being wanted. She likes to be 
 comforting and perhaps even horrible thought 
 comfortable. And always she gets nearer the middle 
 of the web. "To-night after all I had a headache, 
 but to-morrow I will face the facts and tell the truth 
 and tear the whole false fabric to bits " 
 
 To-morrow !
 
 IV 
 
 AN ORDINARY MAN 
 
 HE was driving her home in a taxi, and in em- 
 phasis of something she was saying she 
 pressed his knee with her hand. With a jerk he 
 shrank back into his corner, and revealed to her for 
 the first time the intensity of his passion for her. 
 After that she avoided seeing him alone; but the 
 very fact that they both knew made the atmosphere 
 more explosive. The air was unbreathable with 
 the impending thunderstorm. 
 
 To-day it had broken, and she was looking at 
 him with big, distressed eyes, feeling somehow that 
 it was indecent for her to be seeing a naked soul. 
 His whole face and voice had changed. Every 
 now and then he shut his eyes as if to blot out her 
 physical presence. His mouth seemed a different 
 shape, and his hot, dry lips had a limp, formless 
 look as if he had no control over them. 
 
 The thought struck her that they looked water- 
 proof, but she put the ribald suggestion from her, 
 shocked by her own levity. 
 
 "You are so unlike other women," he said. She 
 accepted it with a sigh, wondering if anyone would 
 ever say to her: "You are all the women who have 
 
 39
 
 4O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 ever lived, and yourself." What fun to be Helen 
 and Cleopatra and Madame de Genlis and Jane 
 Welsh Carlyle! Her mind was wandering. 
 
 "You see, I have never met anyone at all like 
 you," he went on, while she added Ninon de 1'Enclos 
 and Jane Austen to her list. "I didn't know I could 
 want to kiss anyone more than anything in the world 
 and then not do it out of love." 
 
 This brought back her attention. Always she 
 had been loved by sensual men reverently ; once only 
 by an intellectual passionately. Both were flat- 
 tering, the first more convenient, the second more 
 satisfactory. 
 
 "I wonder if_you know what I mean 1 ?" 
 
 "I think I do," she said very gently, as one who 
 had strained her subtlety to meet the peculiarities of 
 the situation. 
 
 "I believe you would find it difficult to forgive 
 me if I kissed you," he went on, "you are so odd. 
 I believe you would really be angry." 
 
 "Not angry sad," she said, smiling a little 
 cynically at this mobilisation of his chivalry. 
 
 "Good God! don't you know I would rather die 
 than make you that*?" 
 
 He knelt down and put his head in her lap. "I 
 wish I could do things for you every day and all day, 
 for ever." 
 
 She seemed to meet him everywhere, and always
 
 AN ORDINARY MAN 41 
 
 the knowledge that he was in the room made her 
 prettier. There is nothing so beautifying as being 
 loved. It was delightful to feel that, whomever he 
 was talking to and whomever he was looking at, 
 his ears and eyes were really running away towards 
 her. 
 
 He never could make up his mind whether to go 
 up to her or not. He hated to have to snatch little 
 moments of her time away from other people 
 people to whom she was merely a woman, or a friend, 
 or even an acquaintance and yet he could not keep 
 away. He had to come up to see whether her face 
 was just the same as he remembered it and to hear 
 the gurgle in her voice like the pouring of water 
 when the jug is nearly full. 
 
 "Poor man, he is terribly in love with you." 
 
 "Do you think so*?" she answered with arched 
 eyebrows. "He is always very sweet to me and he is 
 wonderfully unselfish, and then, poor man" her 
 voice was infinitely tender "he is suffering from 
 shell-shock." 
 
 She liked him best when he hurried her out of 
 draughts, wrapped rugs round her legs, pulled up the 
 collars of her coats and nearly strangled her with 
 her furs. The little touch of clumsiness in his 
 tenderness always melted her. . . . 
 
 "All the afternoon while I played cards at my 
 club I smelt my hands, for it seemed to me that a
 
 42 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 little whiff of your scent had clung to them." . . . 
 
 His letters were curiously better than she expected 
 them to be- 1 always. And she liked his graceful 
 hand-writing and the way he wrote her name. 
 
 There was a woman a girl who was in love 
 with him and of whom he saw a great deal. She 
 always praised her and sometimes wondered. 
 
 The doctor sent him to the country; and twice 
 every day he wrote to her from his chaise-longue, 
 and twice every day she wrote to him in order that 
 no post should be a disappointment. She never 
 could resist illness. He went to stay with the girl 
 and mentioned her very little in his letters. Also 
 he wrote about "your great superiority; when we 
 are together I always feel that I am mixing dross 
 with gold." Little twinges of anxiety went through 
 her. 
 
 "What a contemptible creature I am!" she 
 thought. 
 
 "After all, I didn't want his love." 
 
 He came to stay with her, and his great talent 
 came into play, his talent for country-house life. 
 He did everything better than anyone else; but 
 just now under the doctor's orders he was forbidden 
 exercise. Every morning she went into his room, 
 and he very courteously refused every suggestion 
 she made for his comfort or his happiness. Some- 
 times she played golf before breakfast so that she
 
 AN ORDINARY MAN 43 
 
 should be back in time for him, should he want her. 
 Always she tried to conceal the sacrifices she was 
 making. "I would be so grateful if you would come 
 with me in the motor . . ." Or, if he was installed 
 in the garden, "May I come and sit here for a few 
 minutes'?" 
 
 There were days when nothing was right. He 
 contradicted everything she said, and asked her if 
 she were trying to irritate him. Sometimes at night 
 in bed she cried with exhaustion. 
 
 Her aunt loved him. Such a very nice young 
 man. So sweet to old people. So touchingly de- 
 voted to his mother. Why, he never seemed to think 
 of himself at all. His manners were perfect. He 
 was charming to everyone. He knew something 
 about everything. He rarely seemed to be out of 
 his depth, but then he could swim a little. She 
 smiled at his beautiful steering through the heavy 
 traffic of facts. His public attitude towards her was 
 perfect. Tender, deferential, anxiously considerate, 
 he always seemed to be there to push her chair in 
 or to pull it out; and when he picked up her hand- 
 kerchief or her glove, he gave it her with a peculiar 
 little intimate look that everyone noticed. She knew 
 that people said: "His care of her is really very 
 touching. She is rather a selfish woman." She went 
 on bearing it all, deaf to his delicate, ingenious 
 insults.
 
 44 ! HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "I suppose," she said to herself, "that I love him 
 now that I know the very bottom of his shallows." 
 The thought humiliated her, but she faced it with 
 the rest. 
 
 She could register the arrival of a third person 
 by the change in his voice and his expression. The 
 caressing note and the caressing look that once be- 
 longed to her were now exploited on her. He still 
 lifted her feet on to sofas and tucked a shawl 
 round her unless they happened to be alone. She 
 wondered if he smiled to see her in a trap, and 
 sometimes she wondered why he wanted to keep her 
 there. 
 
 It appeared that the girl was engaged to someone 
 else. Perhaps they were keeping up appearances. 
 She was keeping up appearances for them. And he 
 had once loved her ! 
 
 At last one day he went. He said good-bye very 
 tenderly, though there was only a porter to see them. 
 He looked, she thought, a little guilty. 
 
 Out of the window of the train he took her hand 
 and kissed it. 
 
 "Still the same old scent. I have forgotten what 
 it was called." 
 
 "Gage d' amour" she murmured, ridiculously con- 
 scious that a mist of tears was clouding her eyes. 
 ******* 
 
 "I want you to be the first to know . . ."
 
 AN ORDINARY MAN 45 
 
 So it had come at last, the long-expected letter. 
 She looked quickly down the page for "I want you 
 to love Effie"; and there sure enough it was. 
 
 She laughed a little, and sent them a magnifi- 
 cently impersonal present with an invitation to 
 lunch. 
 
 "You are a wonderful psychologist," said the 
 playwright. "I have never known you wrong." 
 
 "Haven't you 1 ?" she smiled, bantering him with 
 the tone of her voice. And then, seriously: "I was 
 once completely taken in by someone." 
 
 "He must have been a very remarkable person." 
 
 "No," she said, meditatively, "he wasn't. He 
 was yes he was just an ordinary man."
 
 THE GESTURE 
 
 THEY were ridiculously happy. Smiles trickled 
 about her mouth irresponsibly, irrepressibly, 
 while her voice gurgled and bubbled. The fire was 
 hot and glowing, staining bits of the wall and 
 making ruddy puddles among the silver parapher- 
 nalia of tea things. Their faces too, were dyed red 
 and seemed unreal, part of the fantastic delightful- 
 ness of this hour. The windows framed bright blue 
 plaques of evening and a vase of poinsettias looked 
 like a wonderful bunch of scarlet octopuses. She 
 luxuriated in every detail of her happiness, taking a 
 disproportionate pleasure in a bunch of lilies of the 
 valley that lay on her lap and seemed to throw a 
 web of fragrance over the room. 
 
 It didn't matter what either of them said. 
 Everything was equally important and equally 
 irrelevant. Sometimes she would have a little break 
 of wit and he would applaud as if it were a turn. 
 For a moment they would play the game of not 
 being intimate in order to plunge ecstatically back 
 again. Then : 
 
 "I must be back at half past seven," he said. 
 
 That sobered her. 
 
 46
 
 THE GESTURE 47 
 
 "Have you ever thought of the rubato of time," 
 she asked. "That though a clock is a metronome, 
 no two hours are ever the same length*?" 
 
 "Yes," he said. "The shortest are eternal." 
 
 They talked of things so banal that they would 
 have disgraced a debutante at a dinner party and of 
 things of so great a magnitude that it seemed ridicu- 
 lous to mention them at all. And underneath it all 
 ran the strong, swift current of their intimacy. 
 
 "We might never have met," he said. "It was 
 quite, quite an accident." 
 
 "Yes," she smiled. "You restored my confidence 
 in turnings." 
 
 "In turnings?' 
 
 "When I was a child, I thought that round every 
 corner something wonderful was waiting. And then 
 for years the same sort of people seemed to recur 
 like decimals, just a lot of different editions of the 
 same thing. And then I met you." 
 
 "And I was prejudiced to the verge of rudeness. 
 I hardly listened to what you said." 
 
 "Yes, and after making up your mind to hate me 
 you had to climb back on to the fence and dangle 
 your legs on the other side." 
 
 "But be fair. When I did come over to you, I 
 capitulated entirely. I didn't keep one little defense 
 in reserve. Whereas you, who have made a study 
 of giving yourself away, always keep what you
 
 48 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 want to keep inviolate. You with your warm in- 
 vulnerability !" 
 
 "Ah, how much I keep back from you!" she 
 teased him and suddenly she caught sight of her 
 watch. 
 
 Half past seven. 
 
 He saw her and asked how late it was. By the 
 time they had got a taxi it was a quarter to eight. 
 She was going in a diametrically opposite direction 
 to his but she couldn't resist taking him part of the 
 way a very big part of the way till finally she 
 dropped him like a hot potato, it was easier like 
 that, and spurring on her taxi, she rushed to the 
 other side of London. 
 
 She was calling for a very dear friend at his 
 office and she was at least three quarters of an hour 
 late. Would he be hurt or offended, or both? 
 Would she have to spend the whole evening sooth- 
 ing and smoothing his ruffled feelings, till she 
 ended, as she always did in those circumstances, by 
 saying more than she had meant to, by fanning 
 flames she wanted to keep low and then making des- 
 perate efforts to retrieve her indiscretion*? 
 
 "I will have a nice evening," she thought, as she 
 saw herself see-sawing from one extreme to the other. 
 And then she would have to make up her mind 
 whether or not to lie about what had kept her 
 she who loathed lying. And if she didn't, she
 
 THE GESTURE 49 
 
 would be inflicting extra pain and opening up 
 interminable vistas of questionings and justifications 
 and extenuations and so it seemed to her vul- 
 garisations. 
 
 She drove up to the office and rang the bell. No 
 answer. Could it be that he had lost patience and 
 left? She rang again. So even he had come to 
 the end of his forbearance. She thought she could 
 see a light. Better telephone in case he hadn't heard. 
 She crossed the road in search of a telephone and ran 
 straight into him. 
 
 She rushed into a stream of blame and accusation. 
 
 "So you couldn't even wait for me?" 
 
 "My dear," he said, "this is divine of you. It 
 is like you to have given me this lovely surprise." 
 
 Bewildered, she looked at him surely this was 
 rather crude irony? 
 
 "What surprise?" 
 
 "Why to have come so gloriously unexpectedly 
 early. You sometimes hurt me and make me angry, 
 but you always make up for it by some little gesture 
 of a tenderness, some unhoped for gift." 
 
 "What time is it?" she asked, dazed. 
 
 "Just half past seven." 
 
 "But, then it must have been half past six." 
 
 "What must have been half past six?" 
 
 "An hour ago," she answered inanely. 
 
 But he hardly listened.
 
 5O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Thank you, my darling," he said, kissing her 
 hand. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 "I did have rather a rush," she said.
 
 VI 
 
 CYCLAMEN 
 
 I DO love that chintz," he said. Her eyes veiled 
 a discreet question as they turned from the 
 faded pink squiggles to his face. 
 
 He smiled. "I said I loved it not that I thought 
 it beautiful. The pattern is packed with memo- 
 ries for me." He was silent and she said nothing, 
 knowing that no definite enquiry would elicit as 
 much as her indefinite, all-pervading sympathy. But 
 being infinitely curious, she tried a confidence as the 
 first step to a counter-confidence. 
 
 "So many things," she said "are emotion- 
 carriers unexpected, absurd things." 
 ***** 
 
 Then "You are keeping me waiting," he said. 
 
 "Once upon a time there was a man or rather 
 just before the war I knew a man I don't know 
 how to begin. I wasn't in love with him. He 
 wasn't in love with me, but I was a revelation to 
 him a revelation of himself. People said I had in- 
 vented him. It wasn't quite true, but I emphasized 
 what was uncharacteristic in him and forced my 
 estimate on to him, when he was with me he was 
 
 51
 
 52 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 nearly always with me. Away from me he relapsed 
 into his own personality, but I didn't know it. I 
 don't know how to describe him to you. He was 
 often considered almost half-witted. His mind was 
 like a searchlight that overlooked cathedrals, but 
 occasionally lit up some small forgotten chapel. 
 You never knew where it would dive to, what irrele- 
 vant objects it would collect, how many continents 
 would go undiscovered. He was a delightful com- 
 panion. He never seemed to look for anything, but 
 some sixth sense was always finding things. No one 
 else saw them at all, and I suppose I magnified them. 
 
 "Then the war broke out. I was in the North of 
 Scotland when he was reported wounded and miss- 
 ing. The thoughts I thought of him by day con- 
 trolled by my strength of will and by the daylight, 
 broke loose at night, running riot through my de- 
 fenseless head. They didn't become dreams, but 
 seemed parts of an incoherent melee of impressions 
 and memories. And always I was in quest of some- 
 thing fixed, some certain intonation of his voice, some 
 definite expression in his eyes, something stable 
 among my ever-wandering images of him. And 
 always it eluded me. Have you noticed how, when 
 you are anxious about someone, it is the little things 
 that got on your nerves that constitute themselves 
 into claims'? 
 
 "I didn't remember the way he wrapped rugs
 
 CYCLAMEN 53 
 
 'round me; the wide open delighted look his eyes had 
 when he said, 'I never thought of that.' I remem- 
 bered a little bow-tie that looked as if it were made 
 of sponge bag and the fact that he used the word 
 'cheery.' Why had those unimportant details mad- 
 dened me so, and why did they now assert themselves 
 so poignantly? What contract would I not have 
 signed with the devil for a sight of that bow-tie 
 what song or triumph would not have been con- 
 tained in the sound of that word! 
 
 "As you know, the first thing that everyone does 
 in the country is to go to the nearest town. In 
 Scotland the shops are always the same: woollen 
 scarves and tweeds, kodaks and rheumatic sponges, 
 cairngorm dirks and amethyst thistles, scones and 
 Edinburgh rock with the name of the village sub- 
 stituted for Edinburgh. 
 
 "I went in to a chemist's and after rejecting some 
 lozenges and some films, a loofah and a bottle of 
 formamint, I fell to a box of cyclamen face cream. 
 It promised to do all sorts of things for my com- 
 plexion, but I loved it for itself alone and without 
 any vulgar hope of personal advantage. It had 
 the curiously unsickly smell of a woodland flower 
 after a day's rain and it soothed my temples where 
 competitive rhythms of pain were giving a ragtime 
 performance on my exposed nerves.
 
 54 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Two days later I heard that he had been taken 
 prisoner by the Germans, and retaken by the 
 English. A month later he was safe in London 
 and his mother asked me to go and see him. 
 
 "It was October, 1914, and everyone was fam- 
 ished for details of everything. My aunt is not the 
 most tactful of women, but fortunately she didn't 
 know that it was a case for tact, and she did most 
 frightfully want to know what the great war was 
 like. So she suggested coming with me, and we sal- 
 lied forth together. I remember wearing some pink 
 lilies and verbena and soothing myself by looking at 
 them. I felt most frightfully sick and the beating 
 of my heart seemed a form of corporal punishment. 
 
 "We went into the room where he was sitting (he 
 had been badly wounded in the leg) and I said: 
 'I am so glad' ; and my aunt said : 'It is splendid 
 that you are safe. We want to hear all about it/ 
 
 "His face was very pinched, I thought, and he had 
 a haunted look in his eyes as if he had seen things 
 he couldn't get rid of even by telling them. 
 
 "But he answered a lot of questions that I couldn't 
 save him from. And all the time I felt like a 
 violin that is asked to play in tune on a platform 
 without having been given the note. It wasn't that 
 we had anything special to say. One moment in 
 the green room would have put us right, but that 
 moment had been denied us. My aunt seemed to
 
 CYCLAMEN 55 
 
 become gradually aware of the growing constraint 
 and abruptly she took her leave with : 
 
 " 'You two will have things to say to one another, 
 which did not make them any easier to say. How- 
 ever, the dilemma did not last long, as one eager 
 enquirer after the war succeeded another and, keep- 
 ing back the tears which were massing behind my 
 eyes, I surrendered myself to the humour of the situ- 
 ation. I wondered how everything could go wrong 
 so chromatically in such half-tones of disappoint- 
 ment. Laughing, joking, keeping my gnawing sense 
 of frustration at bay, I played up while he watched 
 me with bewildered miserable eyes. 'She doesn't 
 care,' I saw him think, and I realised not for the first 
 time that to men if you laugh you are heartless and 
 if you cry you are hysterical, where as the juste 
 milieu stamps you for ever as a woman without 
 feeling. 
 
 'You fool, you silly fool/ I thought to myself, 
 and to him I said, 'You will come and see me soon*?' 
 In the taxi hot, painful tears forced themselves re- 
 vengefully through my eyes, angry at having been 
 kept back so long. 
 
 "He came to see me, jerky and ill at ease. To 
 find words for what he had to say was like trying to 
 find overcoats for Kitchener's army. We were 
 oppressed by so many things that could only have
 
 56 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 been communicated by wireless and the. current had 
 been broken by that awful meeting. I realised with 
 the supersensitiveness of my tense nerves that his 
 staccato sentences were the end of everything. We 
 made a lot of plans, but I think that we both knew 
 that most of them would remain hardly even en- 
 gagements. When he was going I said, 'I am so 
 happy that you are back safe.' I had, I realised, 
 become a friendly conventional phrase, an eternity 
 away from the throbbing, vibrant 'I am glad' of 
 a few days before. All my anguish and all my joy 
 had died. 
 
 "A year later I walked into a room full of people, 
 feeling that light-heartedness which, though one 
 never remembers it afterwards, is more like ecstasy 
 than any of our heavier emotions ; and as I passed a 
 woman she pulled out her handkerchief. Waves of 
 cyclamen seemed breaking over my head, and I 
 fainted dead away . . ." 
 
 His eyes were twinkling and he put his hand 
 on hers. 
 
 "I love that chintz," he said. "We had it in our 
 schoolroom; it reminds me of buttered toast and 
 watercress and eggs for tea."
 
 VII 
 THE DREAM 
 
 THANK you for all you've done for me." 
 "But I haven't done anything." 
 
 "For being yourself, for being here. I feel as if 
 all my tautness had relaxed, as if my ridiculous, 
 feverish complexities had evaporated in your cool, 
 luminous serenity. Being with you is like bathing 
 naked in a still pool at dawn." 
 
 She smiled at the tumbling eagerness of his 
 phrases. 
 
 "How beautifully you put it," she said. "How 
 worth while you make my passive sedentary life 
 feel." 
 
 He thought of her wonderful sameness, the same- 
 ness of certainty, not of monotony. 
 
 The filmy mysterious greyness of her clothes, her 
 neck encircled with tulle in summer and chinchilla 
 in winter, and pearls dripping out below. The inso- 
 lent arch of her instep, the nervous ripples that went 
 through her long, white, transparent fingers. Her 
 hair like some banked-up mass of deepening shadows, 
 piled above the wasted whiteness of her face; her 
 eyes sheets of colour-drained grey water mirroring 
 the gathering clouds; her quizzical, sardonic mouth 
 
 57
 
 58 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 with its lovely square corners, laughing at the ro- 
 mantic in her and having the last word. 
 
 She was seated on a grey seat, and branching out 
 on either side of it were irises of every tinge : snow- 
 white and red-purple, blue-violet and grey-mauve, 
 erect and self-sufficient, aloof and infinitely beauti- 
 ful. She was wearing a Quaker-plain grey lawn 
 dress and holding her grey gardening gloves on her 
 lap. In spite of his outburst and her acceptance 
 of it, she seemed to him remote and distant beyond 
 the power of words. "What are you thinking 
 about," she asked. 
 
 "I suppose I was thinking about you only I never 
 get any further forward or any deeper down." 
 
 "What do you want to know?" 
 
 "The sphinx's secret." 
 
 "Are you sure she has one?" 
 
 "Quite sure." 
 
 She smiled lazily. "What part of her secret do 
 you want to know?" 
 
 "I want to know how you have reached security; 
 how you have found your island; how you are 
 able to be so deliberate, so calm, so rooted and yet 
 so alive. Whether no ultimate loneliness ever tugs 
 at you; what battle you have had to win to be so 
 complete in your victory." 
 
 "I don't know," she said. "Life to me has ceased 
 to be a fever, a rush, a noise, a kaleidoscope. I seem
 
 THE DREAM 
 
 to have become a plant, a very happy plant with 
 some sort of a flower out all the year 'round." 
 
 "Yes," he sighed. "You are always in flower. I 
 think of you as an iris or a clematis or a magnolia 
 or a delphinium with a touch of all the lilies in the 
 world, but not quite like any special one." 
 
 But her thoughts were far away from him. She 
 thought of her husband who had kissed her as if 
 she were a crucifix and treated her always as some 
 infinitely fragile sacred thing, to be broken by a 
 breath. She thought of the men who had loved 
 her since his death if the reverent devotion she 
 had inspired could be called love of how they, too, 
 had approached her on tip-toe as if her preciousness 
 made her almost into an invalid. She remembered 
 how people said they were frightened of her. She 
 was a "great lady," of a sort that had been sup- 
 pressed by progress and machinery and competition 
 and she wondered what it would be like to be loved 
 passionately with an animal passion. In her bodily 
 loneliness she cried out for roughness, for a primitive 
 sensual disregard of her feelings. She wanted to 
 be "a" woman to "a" man; to be mastered and per- 
 haps crushed. She imagined herself being swept off 
 her feet into some fleeting monstrous adventure. She 
 wanted to see it in all its warm-coloured squalor. 
 The great, big hectoring man ordering dinner in the 
 bleak station hotel forcing her to eat and drink and
 
 6O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 then ordering her up to her bedroom to undress. 
 She could see the bedroom. A great scarlet silk 
 shade to the electric light, a dark red eiderdown, a 
 big brass bed and huge gilt mirrors the strange 
 excrescenses of pattern on the white quilt, the mus- 
 tard roses on the wallpaper. She saw herself un- 
 dressing, a shiver of apprehension going through her 
 and then she heard heavy footsteps in the passage, 
 the bright end of a cigar preceded him into the 
 room, followed by his heavy breathing 
 
 "Ursula!" 
 
 She opened her eyes. There were irises all 'round 
 her and the pale sun was everywhere. 
 
 "Ursula, you must know how much I love you. 
 Will you marry me*?" 
 
 His beautifully cut sensitive profile was bent 
 over her two hands. He kissed them. 
 
 She shivered. 
 
 "My darling, I am worrying you; I am a brute, 
 a rough, monstrous, blundering fool. I won't do 
 it again. I swear I won't. Can you forgive me*?" 
 
 "I wonder," she said bitterly as she tore her hands 
 away.
 
 VIII 
 THE FAREWELL 
 
 SHE opened the door of his office in the tenta- 
 tive way that was her substitute for a knock. 
 She hated a sharp rap and an equally sharp "Come 
 in," but she liked the little preliminary peep with 
 which she took in the scene before she became a 
 part of it. Also she liked the slow, expanding 
 "You," with which he greeted her when he was 
 alone. However hurt or angry he was with her, 
 an automatic reaction of gladness at the sight of her 
 appeared in his eyes before he could control his 
 expression into a suitably distant coldness. To-day 
 was the morrow of a reconciliation that had tired 
 them both out and even then had not been quite 
 complete. He always had a fundamentally sore 
 feeling that she could do without him and he paid 
 for the fact that she was a stimulant by the fact 
 that she was also an irritant. She vitalized and 
 accelerated him quite extraordinarily and yet she 
 was in many ways almost intolerably disintegrating. 
 He held her responsible both for his best work and 
 his worst fits of idleness. She was tender and incon- 
 siderate, vain and intellectually honest, never de- 
 ceiving herself, staggeringly truthful, straight with- 
 
 61
 
 62 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 out being frank, with irritating patches of what he 
 called caution and she called reticence. She was 
 cruel and wounding and hurt and offended by little 
 things, and divinely magnanimous on big occasions. 
 To the really unforgivable she always responded 
 with triumphant unpettiness; if she made mountains 
 out of molehills, she also made molehills out of 
 mountains. The huge insults he had sometimes 
 thrown at her she accepted or rejected on their 
 merits. They did not seem to touch her vanity 
 because they had gone beyond it. And everything 
 about her mattered and did not matter because he 
 loved her. 
 
 She was sitting at his table, fingering his papers 
 and reading bits of them upside down. In all the 
 many scenes she had had with him at that office she 
 always seemed to have read things upside down, as 
 if this unaccustomed effort soothed her nerves. He 
 was sitting on the table with his hands in his pockets 
 and his eyes on the floor. 
 
 "I have come to say good-bye." 
 
 "Yes," he said. 
 
 'Tor six whole months." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Which is a very long time." 
 
 "Yesterday you said that it was a very short 
 time."
 
 THE FAREWELL 63 
 
 "Yes, but to-day is the eve of to-morrow and 
 to-morrow I go." 
 
 There was a pause. He minded much more than 
 she did. The six months would be crowded for 
 her with vivid experiences worked out with all her 
 inexhaustible vitality and curiosity. To him they 
 would be void, empty with the emptiness of her 
 absence. Why then did she ask for a verbal pro- 
 testation from him? 
 
 It was ridiculous, it was intolerable. He said 
 nothing, resisting the effect of her idle hand that 
 lay limp and expectant on the table. He didn't 
 even look at her but remained silently intrenched 
 behind his resolute bitterness. 
 
 For weeks she could do without him, not needing 
 him or wanting him, while his heart gave a great 
 thump each time the telephone bell rang and his 
 feverish fingers fumbled through every pile of letters, 
 looking in vain for one from her. And then she 
 would come and think she could buy back his faith 
 with a few moments of her time, laughing at his 
 reproaches and telling him not to make love a 
 problem of arithmetic. 
 
 And always, of course, he was at the mercy of 
 the sight and the sound of her. 
 
 "Do you think I don't want to believe? Of 
 course I do, but for weeks now you haven't needed
 
 64 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 me and you can't buy back my faith with a few 
 moments." 
 
 "My dear," she said, "don't make us both 
 wretched with your absurd arithmetic weighing mo- 
 ments against hours, hours against days, days against 
 weeks. It is a ridiculous way of calculating." 
 
 "I only long to be convinced." There was an 
 infinite weariness in his voice. 
 
 She took his hand and laid it by her face and 
 murmured caressing, reassuring words while he 
 struggled with bitter memories and still he was only 
 half-soothed. 
 
 "You are coming to tea with me," she said. 
 
 "Perhaps it is better I shouldn't." 
 
 "Don't you want to?" 
 
 "I don't know." 
 
 "You will be sorry to-morrow if you don't." 
 
 "I wonder." 
 
 "Will you come if I want you to?" 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 Her hand crept to his coat and gave it a little tug. 
 
 "Do be nice to me my last day." 
 
 "I don't know how to," he said, and then reluc- 
 tantly and firmly he took her face in his hands and 
 kissed her with a sort of relentless gentleness. 
 After that another silence fell between them, broken 
 at last by a rush of conversation about nothing, or 
 rather about everything but themselves. He asked
 
 THE FAREWELL 65 
 
 her what time her train left ; what she meant to read 
 on the journey; whether she believed in Mother- 
 sill. She asked him about his plans and prospects 
 and the people he meant to see. They wanted to 
 talk about one another, but to have a respite from 
 the pitfalls of their personal relationship. 
 
 Feeling a little cowardly and very wise, they put 
 infinite zest into their questions and answers, ward- 
 ing off with masterly skill the possible entry of 
 reality into the conversation. 
 
 And then, "I must see Miss Green," she said. 
 Miss Green was his secretary. 
 
 "Good-bye, Miss Green; I am going away to- 
 morrow for months." 
 
 "I had no idea of that." 
 
 Miss Green, the typewriter, the books, the files 
 all were so familiar, so precise and intimate to her. 
 She held Miss Green's hand. 
 
 "I shan't disturb you any longer," she said, and 
 her voice sounded strange and choked unexpectedly. 
 The blur in front of her eyes condensed into hot 
 lumpy drops. "I mustn't disgrace myself," she 
 thought, but her final good-bye was a broken affair. 
 
 As he saw her downstairs, every bit of emotion 
 fell from her, her eyes were dry, her voice was cool 
 and she finished her sentences. For all this she was 
 sorry.
 
 66 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Do you know," she said, "I nearly cried when I 
 said good-bye to Miss Green." 
 
 "I didn't know you were so fond of Miss Green." 
 
 She stroked his hand a little and looking up at 
 him with a smile that obliterated all bitterness: 
 
 "Neither did I," she said, as she drove off.
 
 IX 
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 
 
 ADRIAN ROSE was thirty and it was difficult 
 to imagine that he had ever known any other 
 age. It was impossible to associate him with the 
 teens, those glorious, gawky years of shy clumsy 
 ecstasies and passionate floundering plunges into the 
 unknown, or with the immature glistening twenties 
 when life is fizzing and bubbling and bursting and 
 adventure is chary of turning into experience. No, 
 thirty he had been born and however long he lived 
 the ten years between thirty and forty were those 
 ordained for him by fate. When you said he was 
 young you would always be referring to a fact rather 
 than to a quality, and it was in this sense that he 
 liked the word used. He had a horror of the un- 
 fledged. 
 
 Adrian Rose was perfectly happy or perhaps 
 I should say perfectly satisfied with life. He was a 
 second son he preferred to be a second son with 
 all the advantages of a country house to fall back 
 on and none of the disadvantages of having to live 
 there, go to church on Sundays, study agriculture 
 and give garden parties. 
 
 Also by saying "My brother is rather a Philistine 
 
 67
 
 68 i HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 you know," he could deftly hint at a background of 
 breeding. 
 
 Having been left money by an aunt, he was able 
 to live in great comfort a life of leisure, lazy with- 
 out being idle, and occupied without being busy. 
 He was interested in literature, in art, in music and 
 in people, boasting an ignorance of politics and an 
 indifference to science. Praised as a most flattering 
 listener he was glad that the chatter of his neighbour 
 invariably gave him time to frame a piquant contri- 
 bution to the conversation. He took an indefatigable 
 interest in what he was going to say next. A man 
 who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested 
 in everything and talks well, is socially invaluable. 
 If Adrian was never the first person to be asked to a 
 meal, and, let us admit it, very frequently the last, 
 he was nevertheless always the right man in the 
 right place and if not the life and soul, at any rate 
 the cement of a party. 
 
 And then one day an enthusiastic young lady ex- 
 claimed, "You express yourself so beautifully, Mr. 
 Rose. Why don't you write a book*?" A book 1 ? 
 The magic word wrought havoc in his mind. 
 Why not, indeed? Those sensitive fastidious 
 apergues would make a charming little volume. 
 Not on a very big scale of course, but perfect in its 
 way, with a distinct flavour of its own. Gathering 
 his impressions together, he took his pen in his hand
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 69 
 
 while he saw visions of reviews beginning, "A place 
 will be found on the shelves of every book lover 
 for . . ." 
 
 "From A Pergola" appeared. On the paper 
 wrapper the publisher gave a kindly hint to review- 
 ers. "These sketches have the perfection of exquisite 
 bric-a-brac. There is nothing Anglo-Saxon in Mr. 
 Rose's sensitive talent, rather he reminds us of our 
 friends across the Channel." Later quotations ("A 
 pleasant little volume" The Times Literary Sup- 
 plement; "A masterpiece in miniature" Notting- 
 ham Gazette) were inserted and if some of them 
 came from Books in Brief, who could tell that 1 ? A 
 long praising notice appeared in an intellectual 
 weekly; a great leader of fashion pronounced "On 
 Greetings" unapproachable in its genre. "From 
 A Pergola" became a topic of conversation and went 
 into three editions. 
 
 "Does anyone really think it good*?" an inde^ 
 pendent woman whispered to the editor, of the 
 AtTien&um. "It seems to me like one of those shops 
 of which one sees ten in each street with some 
 lingerie, a blouse, a jumper and a hat in the window." 
 
 Mr. Adrian Rose was conscious of the humming 
 buzz of whispers that followed an announcement of 
 his name. Not to have heard of him simply showed 
 that you were out of things. It cast no reflection on 
 him. And his literary success made him work again
 
 7O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 at his charcoals. They were very powerful and black 
 and white, overemphasising the obviously relevant 
 until it fell out of place. He was a man of few 
 strokes and many words. 
 
 And then, bringing disorder into his perfectly 
 arranged life, dismay into his beautifully tidied 
 mind, uninvited, unwanted, bewildering and infin- 
 itely upsetting, came love. Passion is no respecter 
 of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims. 
 How many a would-be Juliet waits in vain for those 
 consuming fires her heart is longing for, while they 
 blaze in the reluctant hearts of Mr. Adrian Roses, 
 who only ask to be left in peace, far from the ridicu- 
 lous and, thank God, equally far from the sublime. 
 Adrian believed in light, irridescent emotions. The 
 ami tie amoureuse was always his objective a 
 glove, a fan, a camelia these were to him the 
 symbols of love. He imagined himself behaving 
 with infinite delicacy in rather difficult situations. 
 Hiding a bleeding heart beneath a gallant smile he 
 withdrew in favour of his rival, or, sacrificing his 
 happiness for hers, he reconciled his beloved with her 
 husband. Never by any chance was he left with a 
 woman on his hands but always he left behind 
 him a little aching void which nothing else could 
 fill. These day dreams occupied his mind so pleas- 
 antly that he hardly sought to carry them into effect. 
 He waited confidently for Providence to cast him
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE Jl 
 
 for the role he had chosen for himself. And as so 
 frequently happens, Providence played him false. 
 
 Amber Vane, who had lost her parents as a baby, 
 had been brought up by an aunt in an old grey house 
 that seemed to have become white and transparent 
 with age. Surrounded by a water-lily laden moat 
 you caught two tantalising glimpses of it from the 
 road, and each time you believed that you had seen 
 some mirage, a gleaming apparition, the ghost of a 
 house. 
 
 Millet Court, protected by the monosyllables of its 
 yokels and the maze of lanes by which it was sur- 
 rounded, remained deliciously inviolate in spite of 
 repeated efforts to pierce its privacy by lovers of 
 architecture or adventure. Miss Millet did not be- 
 lieve in God and ignored the very existence of her 
 neighbours. She spoke French and Italian, she 
 played the harp, she read indefatigably. The village 
 accepted her iron rule and her home brewed medi- 
 cines as they accepted the seasons. She belonged as 
 intimately to them as the soil they tilled and yet in 
 a sense she was awe-inspiring, an undoubted ambas- 
 sadress of fate. Two passions she had, gardening 
 and Amber. Flowers grew for her where they had 
 never grown before by her love they pushed 
 through an unfriendly soil gallantly defeating a 
 hostile climate. Miss Millet seemed to have made 
 some unholy compact with nature.
 
 72 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 But greater even than her passion for her flowers 
 was her passion for her niece. Not only had she 
 watched Amber grow but she had been able to share 
 with her the store of knowledge and experience that 
 had accumulated in her memory and her very real 
 love of the highways and the byways of literature. 
 Time had been when Miss Millet had explored the 
 highways and byways of many worlds and her 
 choice of solitude had not been a retreat but a con- 
 quest. She had not run away from life, she had in a 
 way run through it or at least through the forms and 
 phases of it that surrounded her. With Amber left 
 to her she retired to Millet Court and from that 
 day forward none of her friends crossed the thresh- 
 old. "It is a hard thing," she wrote, "to cut out 
 friendship, but the form of existence I have chosen 
 would die were I not to perform the operation." 
 
 Amber was brought up without companions or 
 masters or mistresses. But she was constantly in 
 contact with the courage, the honesty, the dry wit, 
 the wide learning, the warm understanding of Miss 
 Millet. The hermit had not ceased to be a woman 
 of the world, she had added another world to the 
 kingdoms of her experience. Her niece, brought up 
 in close touch with nature, learned the facts of life 
 early and simply. A cultivated artificial ignorance 
 was not used to produce the bloom of innocence. 
 She grew in sun and shower and bloomed in beauti-
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 73 
 
 ful unself-consciousness, and then suddenly when 
 she was eighteen her aunt died and she was plunged 
 into the life she had heard of and read of and never 
 seen. 
 
 T* T^ *f* *T* *|* *f* *J* 
 
 "May I introduce you to my cousin Miss Vane? 
 Mr. Rose Mr. Adrian Rose." She knew her cousin 
 well enough to know that the Christian name added 
 so ostentatiously was a certificate of fame. But 
 "From A Pergola" had not reached Millet Court and 
 the "Adrian" only left her consciously ignorant. 
 "My cousin," added Lady Blair, "has been brought 
 up entirely in the country in the most divine old 
 house that now belongs to her. She has come to 
 London to explore the world." 
 
 He looked at her. She was smiling a little and 
 it struck him that she knew more than Lady Blair 
 would ever know. 
 
 "You seem, if I may say so," he said, "to be start- 
 ing your adventure very calmly. But you are quite 
 right, the people who have train fever spend much 
 too much time in stations." 
 
 He always tried to remember afterwards exactly 
 what he had thought of her that day. But his first 
 impression had got inextricably entangled with other 
 later ones and he could never get it free. 
 
 He knew when he was with her that she was tall 
 and slim and white, with pale coral lips and a cloudy
 
 74 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 background of hair. The whole of her seemed 
 pencilled in, a delicate faint unfussy outline. But 
 when he left her he could never conjure her up in 
 detail, for her eyes which should have provided a 
 clue, a vivid mark in his memory, lamentably failed 
 to do either. It was difficult to say why they were 
 unlike other eyes in their deep unbroken grey on a 
 blue-white ground, but somehow they seemed not 
 to reveal but to conceal her soul, like some heavy 
 curtain drawn across her individuality. Sometimes 
 he felt that he had caught a glimpse of something 
 that the curtain had been drawn aside for a second- 
 but always it fell back into place before he could 
 make sure. 
 
 When he had been with her he emerged renewed, 
 vital, vivid, faith aflame and doubt in ashes. If 
 there was a damp dark note somewhere deep down 
 within him, she convinced him that it was only a 
 necessary place in which to grow the lilies of the 
 valley of his fancy that fragile sort with trans- 
 parent primrose leaves. And when he was with her 
 his conversation glowed and glittered, his gift of ex- 
 pression becoming almost tropical. It was as if her 
 company were some wonderful chemical that gave 
 a new brightness to all his colours. 
 
 But after he had left her he could never remem- 
 ber what she had said. 
 
 Gradually she obsessed him and he became a man
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 75 
 
 of one idea, a thousand hoping doubts and a thou- 
 sand doubting hopes in fact a man in love. 
 
 When he was with her now he stammered. He 
 was miserable, angry, impotent. It was his first con- 
 tact with life, and he didn't know that a stammer 
 is the divine eloquence of love. 
 
 But she did. She had been born knowing every- 
 thing, and she had not yet had time to forget it all. 
 She was only nineteen. 
 
 One day they were walking through a bluebell 
 wood, waves of unbelievable blue breaking all round 
 them, the sky playing peep-bo with the trees. "I 
 must speak," he said to himself unhappily, while he 
 realised that he was physically incapable of bring- 
 ing out the most commonplace phrase. He won- 
 dered how people forced the words they wanted out 
 of their mouths. He thought it must be a marvellous 
 gift. 
 
 She was dressed in pale lavender, a lavender para- 
 sol above her head, the sun catching in her hair. Her 
 face was in blue shadow and she seemed infinitely 
 remote. 
 
 He thought what a ridiculously unsuitable name 
 "Amber" was. . . . 
 
 He decided to speak when he saw the next orchis. 
 
 He thought of a woman he had once imagined 
 himself in love with. She had had red hair and 
 green eyes flames and emeralds he had called them
 
 76 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 then that had been when he was very young and 
 red hair had seemed infinitely wicked and alluring 
 and adventurous. . . . 
 
 He saw an orchis and hastily averted his eyes. 
 
 He thought of a rocking horse he had had as a 
 child, dappled grey with a grey yellow tail and a 
 scarlet saddle. . . . 
 
 Another orchis. He looked at her imploringly. 
 
 "What are you thinking about*?" she responded 
 to his appeal. 
 
 "Rocking horses," he said. "Will you marry 
 me?" And then desperately, "I know that's not the 
 way to put it," and then convulsively, "I love you." 
 
 His hands were behind his back and he did not 
 know how to get hold of them. 
 
 She waited till he had finished and then she said 
 in her low, thrilling voice, "That's a very nice way 
 to put it." 
 
 And suddenly released from the iron bondage of 
 fear and self-consciousness he took her in his arms. 
 
 They had come back from their honeymoon to a 
 little grey house in Westminster with a wooden 
 staircase jumping out of the middle of the hall, 
 an octagonal book-lined room with huge armchairs 
 and an immense sofa for him, and a long empty 
 window-studded room for her, all shiny parquet and 
 shiny deep cream paint and creamy lacquer and 
 creamy curtains and touches of primrose and flame.
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 
 
 Upstairs there was a studio for him to draw in. He 
 had thought, "I don't know where I shall draw. 
 Can't draw and write in the same room two things 
 too different-" And she had said, "You can't write 
 in a studio or draw in a study. One thing would 
 interfere with the other and both would be spoilt." 
 
 "My beloved," he had answered, "you know 
 the innermost recesses of my thoughts." 
 
 Fortunately he had ceased to wonder about hers. 
 
 Their honeymoon had been perfect but in spite of 
 her intimate understanding of him, he had sometimes 
 felt little twinges of doubt as to his knowledge of her. 
 They vanished almost immediately, but one endur- 
 ing image remained. It was his marriage night. 
 Drowned almost in the flood of his passion he had 
 caught a glimpse of her before he went under. She 
 didn't look disgusted or frightened or shocked but 
 cool and untouched and aloof as if she were not 
 implicated in this experience but were watching it 
 from far away. Physical intimacy did not seem to 
 reach her remoteness. But when he was telling her 
 all about himself, his slightest reactions to the slight- 
 est experiences, the tiniest little details of his intri- 
 cate psychological peculiarities, then her absorbed 
 interest wiped out all tiresome impressions. The 
 infectious gurgle of her laugh reassured him com- 
 pletely. 
 
 They settled down to life a smooth, beautifully
 
 78 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 run life. There were days when the perfection of 
 his household surprised him and days when he took 
 it for granted. It was winter and the house was 
 full of leafless white lilac from Holland, and Poin- 
 settias, arum lilies, violets and gardenias from Mil- 
 let. The flames in the open fireplaces, the Paul 
 Veronese heaps of fruit on the table, the Queen Anne 
 silver, the Waterford glass, the white Wedgewood 
 china, the old family cook, her niece the stillroom 
 maid, the old family recipes, all combined to achieve 
 the perfection of old fashioned country house com- 
 fort. 
 
 Adrian had never seen Millet. Amber had un- 
 accountably unaccountably to him refused to 
 take him there, if the delicate unanswerable reasons 
 connected with his comfort which she produced could 
 be called a refusal. Of course the country was very 
 cold in winter. He tried to remember what she had 
 said in the summer while they were engaged, but he 
 couldn't. However, he soon forgot all about it, 
 and from time to time she slipped off alone, having 
 first arranged the most perfect plans for him, a very 
 small and recondite man's dinner or a tete-a-tete 
 evening with an irresistible incomprise. 
 
 He wondered how she had discovered that the 
 incomprise was longing to pour out her heart to him. 
 She was always leaving him alone with women who 
 wanted to confide in him. His friendship was, they
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 79 
 
 explained (he could wish they didn't always use the 
 same words), the one bright spot in their drab lives. 
 He found himself looking at the diamonds that 
 trickled all over one of these poor victims. 
 
 "You wear your chains," he said. What a de- 
 lightful fancy ! He made a note of it. "Bound by 
 jewels," sounded poetic if you caught the right 
 aspect but it might have rather a cinema ring. He 
 must ask Amber. ; 
 
 "Doesn't your wife mind?" asked one of the 
 distressed ones hopefully, "my having you like this 
 all to myself?" 
 
 Amber had said she mustn't be selfish. He was a 
 writer. He must have experience. It struck him 
 suddenly that she ought to be jealous just a little 
 tiny bit jealous it would be only natural, only 
 right. 
 
 That night, as if in response to his unformulated 
 grievance, she murmured, "Perhaps I am not quite so 
 strong-minded as I thought I was Perhaps after 
 all. ..." He was enchanted. 
 
 His marriage really was a success. 
 
 The next evening at dinner Amber deftly led the 
 conversation to the subject of Mrs. R , her hus- 
 band, her discontent, her jewels. 
 
 "She wears her chains t " said Adrian. 
 
 It had a great success.
 
 80 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "It is better thus," he thought. "An epigram 
 should never be diffused into a sketch." 
 
 "Under A Shady Tree." 
 
 More musings by the author of "From A Per- 
 gola," appeared in April. 
 
 "We notice a new note a deeper, a more human 
 note in the work of Mr. Adrian Rose. There is a 
 throbbing pulse of life in 'Under A Shady Tree,' 
 which was lacking in 'From A Pergola.' ' 
 
 Adrian was enchanted about the "throbbing 
 pulse." He began to think of writing a novel or 
 even a play. Amber thought that some short stories 
 might exploit the "human note" without losing the 
 whimsical delicacy of his ordinary genre. 
 
 In the meantime he began to think of going back 
 to his drawing. For some reason or other he didn't 
 discuss this with Amber. He toyed with the idea 
 alone, happy and a little guilty with his secret 
 plans. Perhaps it might even end in a little show. 
 
 And then one day Amber said, "Don't you think 
 it would be a nice change if you took up your char- 
 coals again? We might even organise a little ex- 
 hibition"?" 
 
 He looked at her, horrified, why he couldn't tell. 
 
 "Are you a thought-reader*?" 
 
 She smiled, "Not that I know of." 
 
 "Well, I don't mind telling you that there are 
 times when a man likes to make his own plans."
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 8l 
 
 "But of course, darling, I quite understand." 
 
 "Understand? You make a positive business of 
 it. The understood never seem to be asked whether 
 they forgive. Great fun being the patron and all 
 that but what about the victim?" And he rushed 
 out of the room. 
 
 After that he watched her suspiciously. He be- 
 came obsessed by the thought that he had no con- 
 trol over what he was doing. What was the new 
 "human note," the "throbbing pulse" ? It was Amber. 
 His book was a mere hollow farce, her personality 
 shining through his words. His words? Perhaps 
 they were her words! Every day he became more 
 wretched. If it looked like rain and he picked up 
 his umbrella in the hall he felt she had put it there 
 meaning him to take it. When he started a daring 
 or original topic of conversation and saw her smiling 
 at him, he felt it had come from her. 
 
 He took to examining her, watching her, and he 
 realised bitterly how little he knew her. She never 
 talked about herself and like a detective he tried to 
 catch her in some unconscious lapse into self-revela- 
 tion. 
 
 And always he was fighting her, trying to free 
 himself of her. Meanwhile, life went on. His char- 
 coals were hung in the best light, the conversation 
 was manoeuvred up to the epigram his epigram. 
 
 On his mother's birthday an immense bunch of
 
 82 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 lilies of the valley her favourite flower lay on 
 the breakfast table. He had meant to order them 
 but he had forgotten. 
 
 "What are those for*?" he asked sulkily. 
 
 "For your mother." 
 
 "Why don't you send them to her?" 
 
 "Because they are from you, darling. I'm going 
 to send her something else." 
 
 "What the devil do you mean by ordering my 
 present to my mother?" 
 
 "But you always give her lilies of the valley. 
 They are her favourite flower and she loves them, 
 specially when they come from you." 
 
 "I like ordering my own lilies." 
 
 "But you had forgotten them, hadn't you*?" 
 
 "Oh for goodness sake don't argue. I'm sick of 
 being forestalled at every turn." 
 
 His mother loved the flowers loved him for hav- 
 ing thought of them loved him for having re- 
 membered her birthday in time to order them the 
 day before, so that she should have them quite 
 early in the morning. 
 
 Amber's present didn't come till next day. Lady 
 Rose loved her and realised that she couldn't be 
 expected to remember her mother-in-law's birthday 
 till it arrived, when Adrian had brought her round 
 to wish his mother many happy returns of the day. 
 The whole incident made him furious.
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 83 
 
 The silent battle between husband and wife con- 
 tinued. He became daily more unstrung and she 
 seemed daily more unconscious. 
 
 "Under A Shady Tree" had had a great success 
 and he was invited to be the guest of honour at a 
 literary dining club with speeches after dinner. 
 Adrian loved an after dinner speech. The atmos- 
 phere of dessert and port and cigar smoke, the mix- 
 ture of muzzy geniality and exuberant wit delighted 
 him. 
 
 Amber chose the night in question to go down to 
 Millet. She bade a tender farewell to her husband 
 and he sallied forth exhilarated by his independence 
 and the prospect of an excellent dinner in excellent 
 company. The evening was a great success and his 
 speech a positive triumph but as he walked home and 
 tried to remember what he had said phrases of 
 Amber's stuck out in his mind till he couldn't be 
 sure whether he had used them or not. All night 
 long they ran through his dreams like a semi-con- 
 sciously hummed tune till he forced himself to wake 
 up only to find them as persistently haunting his 
 
 thoughts. 
 
 Finally unable to bear it any longer he got up 
 dashed into his clothes, examined Bradshaw, rushed 
 to the station and caught the train to Millet. 
 
 There he found an old brougham drawn by a 
 single decrepit old white horse with an even older
 
 84 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 coachman on the box. "Mr. Rose, sir*?" he en- 
 quired, "This is the Millet Court carriage; one 
 of the carriages," he added with pride. "Miss Amber, 
 Mrs. Rose that is, begging your pardon Sir, said 
 but what you might be coming this morning." 
 
 His thoughts were in a whirl. He didn't notice 
 the box hedges, the blaze of tulips, the transparent 
 house. His face was white and set, he strode through 
 the garden gate unseeing and unswerving straight 
 to where his wife sat on a stone seat. 
 
 "How did you know I was coming 1 ?" his voice was 
 strained. 
 
 She smiled. "I kind of felt you would." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Well there are things you have wanted to say 
 to me for a long time, aren't there*?" 
 
 Resolutely he ignored this final touch in the night- 
 mare. "Yes," he said, "there are things I want to 
 say to you. I want to tell you that you have ruined 
 my life. You with your understanding, you have 
 cut me off from the unexpected. You have covered 
 up this and exploited that, you have manoeuvred my 
 deficiencies, you have forestalled my impulses. I 
 haven't been able to think or feel or act for myself. 
 I have ceased to exist as an independent person. 
 I am your creation, your puppet. God has never 
 had to forgive for He has never been understood." 
 He stopped breathless and then for a moment every-
 
 TOUT COMPRENDRE 85 
 
 thing was blotted out by his vision of her as she stood 
 there, a lavender parasol over her head, her face in 
 blue shadow, the sun catching in her hair. And all 
 around her he seemed to see wave after wave of 
 bluebells And then he heard her low thrilling 
 voice. 
 
 "My dear," she said, "forgive me I I so under- 
 stand."
 
 X 
 
 THREE LOVE LETTERS 
 
 A LETTER 11 A. M. 
 
 THERE is such a lot of sunshine in my room 
 and clouds of rainbow dust. When my maid 
 pulled the curtains I felt a rush of light and my eye- 
 lids became warm and transparent and I felt ridicu- 
 lously happy as happy as a cat on a doorstep. 
 
 I forced myself not to say "Are there any letters" 
 because I wanted to prolong the expectation. Do you 
 remember when I was ill and you came to see me, 
 I never said "Come in" at once when you knocked, 
 because I loved to imagine your face and just how 
 you would tiptoe into the room and to think of you 
 coming nearer and nearer to me and reaching the 
 bed and bending over me and no I mustn't make 
 myself want to be ill again. Surely it must make 
 life longer and joy more lasting if you can live 
 through some moments three times'? To return to 
 this morning, I made such a weak silly compromise. 
 I said "Have the papers come," and my maid went 
 to look and brought them with a whole pile of letters 
 which 1 let run through my fingers like sand. I toyed 
 with them and felt the shapes of the envelopes and 
 
 86
 
 THREE LOVE LETTERS 87 
 
 the texture of the paper and my fingers trembled a 
 little and I smiled. Then I read them very slowly, 
 luxuriating in the details of an advertisement, care- 
 fully examining each item in every bill, deliberately 
 concentrating my mind on Aunt May's inventory of 
 domestic disasters (why is she a perfect fly-paper 
 for illnesses, misfortunes, accidents and quarrels'?), 
 in order to give myself time to stretch the golden 
 moment of looking forward. At last my heart was 
 beating so fast that I could bear it no longer and I 
 opened your letter. . . . 
 
 I love to see my name in your writing. I love to 
 hear my name when you say it. It is a caress in 
 itself, it means so much more than any term of en- 
 dearment because it belongs so essentially to you and 
 to me. I knew you were cross yesterday and ridicu- 
 lously annoyed at our never being left alone. You 
 ought to cultivate my plan of loving things in 
 suspension. When I went up to you and said "Good- 
 bye" and shook hands with you I felt that we had 
 reached the apex of an intimacy. Surely you heard 
 all the whispers in the world in my "Good-bye." 
 Surely you felt the absolute surrender in my hand 
 shake 4 ? 
 
 Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary com- 
 monplace conventional things with magic and signifi- 
 cance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy 
 flowers at night?
 
 00 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 In a way I don't see why you should ever want 
 to kiss me again. Do you understand what I mean, 
 that I feel so merged, so eternally in your arms that 
 
 1 can hardly believe in the process of being taken 
 into them again and again. Oh my dear, do you 
 notice how one never can use superlatives when they 
 really would mean something"? They seem to slink 
 away ashamed of their loose lives. After all we 
 can't "make love" to one another. We both do it too 
 well. This is not an incident, a game, an art; ours is 
 not a love affair, it is life. So you must never again 
 be cross when we are in a room full of people and 
 I shake hands with you and say "good-bye." Of 
 course I am not true to my creed. Thank God. 
 Otherwise, if I pushed it to a logical conclusion I 
 should say that it didn't really matter if we never 
 met. Whereas, well you know that I who loathe 
 railways always travel by train now, simply because 
 if I go away from you by motor I can't bring myself 
 to start. I am always passing some miraculous blue- 
 bell wood or an orchard in bloom or a Persian cat 
 or a black purple lilac bush that though I send 
 them straight to you I long to share with you on 
 the spot. 
 
 Then, too, I get frightened. I believe that every 
 motor bus is aiming at you, and I get a little jealous 
 of men. I like you to see women, lots of women 
 each one will remind you of me, will rub me in,
 
 THREE LOVE LETTERS 89 
 
 will widen the gap of my absence. Have you made 
 me the vainest woman in the world? Would I 
 deserve to be loved by you if I weren't? God bless 
 you, my Precious. 
 
 II 
 
 12:30 P. M. 
 
 It has been such a long day! So hot that the 
 air seemed solid. So glaring that the sun seemed 
 all round one. I got up at 12 in order to be sure that 
 everyone had dispersed. There is always the risk 
 of finding someone reading or writing, so I went 
 straight into the garden. I don't yet know who is 
 staying here. There seem to me to be so many 
 people that my only hope or fear is that I may 
 know some of them by sight before I go. 
 
 This morning some had gone to church, some were 
 on the river; some played lawn tennis. I sauntered 
 happily along wondering what it would feel like if 
 you were suddenly to appear, imagining the little 
 stab of surprise and ecstasy with which I would 
 realise that it was really you, and, lo and behold, 
 Richard wandering aimlessly in quest of someone 
 to make love to. I thought it unlike him to be so 
 improvident as to leave the lady to chance, so I 
 hastily hid behind a red hot poker and escaped out
 
 9O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 of the walled garden only to run straight into 
 Charles' arms. 
 
 "At last I have found you," he exclaimed, which 
 was civil if untrue, and I said "Let's go and watch 
 the lawn-tennis," because it seemed an impersonal 
 occupation. What an idiotic thing to say ! Every- 
 thing is impersonal when you are not there. It is 
 only you who make anything personal, who make 
 everything personal. 
 
 At lunch we were reinforced by an Ambassador, 
 who had motored down from London, and the 
 Bishop, who had preached in the morning. They 
 boomed, one on either side of our hostess, in perfect 
 contentment, thoroughly enjoying themselves. What 
 an admirably true and expressive phrase taken 
 literally ! 
 
 My neighbour praised you to me and I was modest 
 and deprecating as if he had been praising me. 
 Afterwards this struck me as rather ridiculous and 
 very sublime. He asked me if you weren't a friend* 
 of mine"? I suppose I looked amazed but then I 
 realised that perhaps you are a friend of mine. I 
 had never thought of it before. The right thing to 
 say would be "You are my best friend," but I don't 
 feel that a bit. I don't feel that we are sufficiently 
 separate and independent. You are a part of me 
 and if you weren't that you would be nothirig 
 nothing at all. It is awful to think that there are
 
 THREE LOVE LETTERS 
 
 hundreds and thousands of people to-day who are 
 going about with their hearts or souls amputated. 
 
 The Bishop is very much a man of the world 
 this world. I think he will feel rather lost in the 
 next, only his psychological bump of locality is so 
 good that it will probably take him home anywhere. 
 The Ambassador is a Christian in the true sense of 
 the word. It was entertaining to see them together. 
 
 All the afternoon I played tennis and after tea I 
 came up to rest because I wanted to be all alone with 
 you in the scented dusk. I am all alone with you 
 always, my beloved. But sometimes I want to purge 
 the surface of life to empty the passages and the 
 ante-rooms. I want not only not to see or hear, but 
 not to be seen or be heard, so that even the physical 
 impression of me is yours alone. It is awful to have 
 a surface that one can't withdraw. 
 
 Uncle Will asked where I had been all day. I 
 told him. He said "Not your arms and legs but 
 your self. Your thoughts.", I explained to him that 
 I had come round to his view of life, that I was tired 
 of pomps and vanities and that henceforth I was 
 going to adopt the geological attitude towards the 
 world. 
 
 He laughed and shook his head. 
 
 What are you doing at this very moment my be- 
 loved? My sheets are like cool shiny pocket hand- 
 kerchiefs, there is a white fur rug on the ground by
 
 92 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 my bed. On the chair is my white velvet dress that 
 you love. It looks like a lovely spilt silver liquid 
 in the moonlight. The smell of the jasmine round 
 my window is overpowering, my quilt has entangled 
 a moonbeam sent me by you. I send it back because 
 the only things that belong to me are those that I 
 have given you. My own. 
 
 in 
 
 2 A. M. 
 
 I can't sleep. There is something oppressive 
 in the atmosphere. I feel sick and giddy and my 
 heart is so assertive, beating noisily and revenge- 
 fully as if it bore me a grudge. I feel as if I were 
 in the wings just waiting for my cue, nervous and 
 miserable. There is always a tenseness when you 
 are not there, a cumulative unreality. I have felt 
 it all day and it has worked me up to fever pitch. 
 I seemed to be a ghost wandering about in some 
 meaningless void. It was not only that, I couldn't 
 believe in the people, I could not even believe in 
 the chairs and tables, it was tiring. You know 
 how in fairy tales the lovely Princess is turned into 
 a toad and has to wait for a kiss to release her, that 
 was what I felt like that nothing but your touch 
 could make me into a human-being again.
 
 THREE LOVE LETTERS 93 
 
 After lunch a serious young man asserted mourn- 
 fully, "You are very beautiful," and then as I 
 hesitated between the equally coquettish courses of 
 acceptance or rejection he added, "You are not 
 happy." This, I indignantly repudiated but he 
 brushed my protestations aside and looking particu- 
 larly gloomy and oracular he stated, "You may not 
 know, but I do, you lovely frail thing." 
 
 Tell me, did people always talk like that 4 ? I 
 can't remember. Ever since I have known you 
 reality has blazed at me and all my old life seems so 
 hazy and shadowy I have cast off my old self like 
 a winter skin and people think I am the same person 
 and talk to me on that assumption, which makes me 
 feel a bewildered stranger. I am not of course think- 
 ing of the young man who was obviously working 
 on some theory about women a sort of roulette 
 system. 
 
 Darling Heart, I feel a little calmer when I am 
 writing to you. I want to go to sleep so that my 
 dreams may bring me a little reality. 
 
 God bless you.
 
 XI 
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 
 
 NEARLY every afternoon Rosemary and Mrs. 
 Dearborn drove out together in a fly, making 
 a leisurely escape from the garish, rhetorical scenery 
 of the coast where the crimson rocks and sapphire 
 sea seem to have caught God in a poster mood. As 
 they got away from the face it shows to the world, 
 the countryside assumed a more relaxed and loving 
 expression, the hills were at once more intimate and 
 more remote, the sky was unfaithful to the adver- 
 tisements and became paler, more transparent, more 
 lovely. They drove through nestling, crouching vil- 
 lages, drinking in with their eyes the silvery olives 
 on their carpet of emerald jade, the fuzzy, outline- 
 less almond trees posturing against the sky so many 
 pink smudges on the unbroken blue. 
 
 Both ladies had been ill, but Rosemary, though 
 pale and thin and easily tired, was alive and radiant 
 and easily revived on the brink of life, on the 
 threshold of adventure, ready to accept all chal- 
 lenges, laugh at all setbacks, take every risk and 
 She hadn't got any further than that, for she didn't 
 want to settle down for a long time yet to that happi- 
 ness which was of course waiting for her. 
 
 94
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn was making a slow, painful recov- 
 ery, punctuated by relapses. She looked frail and 
 faded and a little frayed like some old brocade, 
 made rare and precious and lovely by time and wear. 
 It was not so much that she was old as that she was 
 so essentially not new. 
 
 She loved being with Rosemary, who in exchange 
 for experience brought her forgetfulness thus be- 
 longing to the blessed who give more than they re- 
 ceive. 
 
 Rosemary had the vital, militant curiosity of 
 youth. She believed in leading questions ; they were 
 frank, they were flattering, and, she maintained, 
 they were tactful. In asking them you laid yourself 
 open to being laughed at, being snubbed or being 
 answered. Surely that was fairer than the circuit- 
 ous trap-laden zigzag by which, observing the dic- 
 tates of delicacy, your friends attempted to trip you 
 up into a confidence. 
 
 They drove this afternoon for some time in 
 silence, and then abruptly Rosemary said, "Tell me 
 what your husband is like?" She knew that Mrs. 
 Dearborn wasn't happy, and to her unhappiness 
 meant an unhappy marriage, and an unhappy mar- 
 riage must be either the wife's fault or the husband's. 
 In this case, as she knew the wife, the fault was 
 obviously the husband's. 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn opened her wide grey eyes even
 
 96 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 wider than usual. She always looked a little sur- 
 prised, a little bewildered, as if life had suddenly 
 been brought to her notice a guest forced on her 
 when she was not at home. "I wonder," she mur- 
 mured vaguely, " I mean I wonder how to de- 
 scribe him to you. He is very big " Her voice 
 
 trailed off. 
 
 Rosemary waited. 
 
 "I am afraid my illness has been a terrible ex- 
 pense. He has been very good about it." Mrs. 
 Dearborn managed to convey subtly that he had not 
 been very good about it. "But of course it is so diffi- 
 cult for the people who are always well to under- 
 stand bad health, and Charles thinks that I don't 
 lead the right sort of life, that I am not outdoors 
 enough. He is a wonderful fisherman and a very 
 good shot." 
 
 "Why did you marry him*?" 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn knew the answer to that. It was 
 an answer she had made very often. "I was very 
 young only seventeen and we were such a big 
 family. My father and mother were enchanted 
 when Charles proposed. He was a neighbour, with 
 a big property and heaps of money it seemed heaps 
 to us. His mother always drove to church with a 
 footman and wore such beautiful old lace. Old 
 lace means nothing," added Mrs. Dearborn with 
 sudden, unexpected passion. "Nothing. You can't
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 97 
 
 sell it. You can't cut it. It simply lies about in 
 drawers and is the wrong length if ever you want to 
 use it." She subsided. "And then there were the 
 family jewels big, yellowish diamonds that had 
 been reset in 1850. It all seemed to suit Lady 
 Amelia. She was a terrifying old lady, holding her- 
 self beautifully, invariably courteous to her in- 
 feriors and insolent to her equals." 
 
 "Did she like you?' 
 
 "I was penniless, but she thought it vulgar to 
 mention money. In her way she was a great lady. 
 'The cnild is a gentlewoman,' she said. 'If she were 
 a princess she could not be more and,' she added 
 drily, 'she might be less !' When we married she in- 
 sisted on moving into the dower-house, and all that 
 first year, while I was expecting Tom, she was very 
 good to me. Soon after he was born she died, and 
 I felt that I had lost not only a friend but a ram- 
 part. I think she always knew I didn't love her 
 son as I should. What she did not know was that 
 I cared for someone else." 
 
 Rosemary was thrilled. Her green eyes were 
 dancing. 
 
 "Tell me about him," she begged eagerly. 
 
 "He was tall and dark and ascetic looking. He 
 reminded one of a crusader or some mediaeval knight- 
 errant. He was always talking to me about the in- 
 justices he was going to fight; and he said that, with
 
 98 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 me to keep his armour bright by his armour he 
 meant his ideals he thought he really could make 
 the world a little happier." 
 
 "And you deserted him?" 
 
 "Well, he was nineteen and I was seventeen. I 
 married Charles ; and he became a very distinguished 
 novelist. His name is Hilary Severn." 
 
 "Hilary Severn, the Hilary Severn? Then you 
 are the heroine of all his books the exquisite sensi- 
 tive woman crushed by the brutality of the world! 
 Sometimes, you know, I thought he capitalised mis- 
 fortune, but now I see he was always thinking of 
 you and of course the coarse, unsensitive husbands 
 were all Mr. Dearborn." 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn smiled. "Don't jump to con- 
 clusions. Hilary never knew Charles. He wrote 
 and wished me happiness, and said that I should 
 always be his great inspiration through life his star 
 I think he called it but that he didn't want to see 
 me. It would be too painful." 
 
 "Oh how wonderful ! But of course he never mar- 
 ried or if he did it must have been years afterward 
 out of kindness." 
 
 "I don't know I have never seen him since. I 
 so seldom go to London." 
 
 There was a silence. Rosemary thought, "Ah, 
 the worst books must be true then. Life is like a 
 serial Hurrah !"
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 99 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn thought, "I wonder if his wife is 
 like me at all, or if he married someone very young 
 and fluffy and second-rate. I should hate her to be 
 yery young." She turned again to Rosemary, "My 
 dear," she said. "You mustn't think that Charles is 
 a villain. He is just the wrong man married to the 
 wrong woman. He ought to have had a sporting, 
 out-of-door wife. Someone whom he could have 
 described in his favourite phrase as 'an awfully jolly 
 little woman, plucky as they make 'em.' I was no 
 good for that." 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn looked very pathetic; Rosemary's 
 chivalry was aroused. "It is like you to defend 
 him," she said. "He must be horrible." And 
 Mrs. Dearborn left it at that. 
 
 A few days later Charles unexpectedly arrived. 
 He was undoubtedly what is described as a splendid 
 specimen of the human race, a very Viking of a man. 
 Rosemary, as a loyal champion of his downtrodden 
 wife, was frankly hostile from the first and full of 
 ostentatious little attentions to her friend. But she 
 found the attitude hard to keep up. Charles with his 
 golf-clubs, his tennis-rackets, his fishing-rods, his irre- 
 pressible spirits, his inexhaustible plans for picnics 
 and excursions of all sorts, seemed to be plotting fun 
 for them all the time. And whether it was an expe- 
 dition to Grasse for scent or to Monte Carlo for gam- 
 bling, his frank enjoyment of everything and his
 
 1OO I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 efficient control of the practical arrangements, made 
 him invaluable either as a host or a guest. True, his 
 sense of humour was of the private-school boy 
 variety. He was always talking of a "hole in his 
 racket," "a hand like a foot," and making jokes in 
 which beds or whiskey bottles played prominent 
 parts. Every night he said to his wife, "Well, we 
 must go to our baskets; or perhaps I should say, in 
 more refined language, to Bedlam." And every 
 morning he said to Rosemary, "Ho, ho! Miss Rose- 
 mary, for whom are we so beautiful to-day?" And 
 yet he wasn't somehow very like a brute. 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn was always very sweet to her hus- 
 band and very patient. To see her smile at one of 
 his jokes was to realise that it was a very bad joke 
 indeed, and that she was a very good wife. Nobody 
 could accuse her of ever having shown a sign of 
 irritation even when Charles was at his most boister- 
 ous and his most genial. The way her face emptied 
 of all expression when he said "the Missus," or "my 
 old gal," was more eloquent than any comment. She 
 never shrugged her shoulders or looked round for 
 pity. She was an artist. 
 
 Rosemary had refreshed her tremendously. It 
 was a long time since she had talked about her- 
 self to such a sympathetic audience she was al- 
 ways so buried in Cumberland and it was a very 
 long time indeed since she had talked about Hil-
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 1O1 
 
 ary. But now she found herself thinking of him 
 more than she had ever done. The tone of his voice, 
 the things he had said to her, the reverent adoration 
 with which he had surrounded her she remembered 
 them all. And what care he had taken of her! 
 How he had always wrapped her up. He was so 
 afraid of drafts for her, so anxious about her health, 
 so aware of her fragility. "You are so frail, Lily," 
 he used to say, "I am afraid to touch you, to look 
 at you even. I sometimes am haunted by the 
 thought that you may evaporate before my eyes." 
 
 And he had so loved her to be called "Lily." He 
 was always searching for new poems in which her 
 name appeared ransacking the literatures of the 
 world for what he called a "mention of her." 
 
 Charles had said, "I wonder what they wanted to 
 give you a housemaid's name like Lily for. No ac* 
 counting for parents, is there*?" She had been so 
 relieved that he had not loved her name. She would 
 have hated Hilary to have to share anything with 
 him. 
 
 "What do you think of my husband, Rosemary*?" 
 asked Mrs. Dearborn one day. 
 
 Rosemary blushed. "I don't know Of course, 
 
 I see he can't appreciate you " Mrs. Dearborn 
 
 winced. "That of course a woman like you wouldn't 
 mean anything to him. He isn't fastidious or sensi-
 
 1O2 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 tive I know but I can't help liking him all the 
 same." 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn was disappointed. 
 
 "You don't mind, do you?" 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn looked contemptuously at Rose- 
 mary. "Mind, dear child"? What an extraordinary 
 idea. I long for you to love Charles. I wish more 
 people did." 
 
 ******* 
 
 Mrs. Dearborn was always excited when she was 
 in London. There was so much to see and so many 
 things she wanted to get. She always ended by 
 buying very little, and choosing clothes that would 
 be absolutely unsuited to the country. She adored 
 dresses and she refused to spoil her holiday by re- 
 membering Cumberland. She always regretted this 
 when she got back home, but she never mended her 
 ways. 
 
 To-night she was dining with Rosemary's father 
 and mother, and Rosemary had begged her to look 
 her best. She was wearing a periwinkle-blue chiffon 
 dress, and a big bunch of delicious real Parma violets. 
 She could feel little waves of perfume coming up 
 to her from them. Her eyes were starry with excite- 
 ment as she walked into the drawing-room; there 
 was a faint unconscious smile of pure pleasure on 
 her lips. After dinner she was going to a ball; it 
 made her feel so young and gay.
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 1C>3 
 
 Rosemary dashed to meet her, flushed and radiant, 
 and soon the six people in the room had been intro- 
 duced to her that is to say that she had heard some 
 mumbled, murmured names, not one of which had 
 emerged clearly. 
 
 At dinner she sat between Rosemary's father and 
 a tall, dark man with steel-grey hair and steel-grey 
 eyes. He appeared very stern and rather prosperous. 
 His lips were thin and looked as if he repressed 
 them continually. They were not allowed to be ex- 
 pressive and his smile was a wintry affair. His face 
 was beautifully cut. He sat on the edge of his chair 
 as if afraid to let himself go to the extent of sitting 
 down comfortably. He talked to her en profile. 
 
 "If I were wearing a yashmak he would see more 
 of me," she thought irritably. He seemed to be try- 
 ing to make her feel guilty. She was disagreeably 
 reminded of the cold pudding she was made to eat 
 as a child, while the nurse rubbed in all the little 
 starving children. "A happy, cared-for woman like 
 you doesn't know ' he plunged into a descrip- 
 tion of some slum. She wished he wouldn't spoil her 
 little outing. She so rarely had a treat. 
 
 Then there was a pause in the conversation, and 
 a glowing panegyric of Jane Austen and her novels 
 entangled the general attention. "No one has her 
 sense of form. Her points are pointed instead of
 
 1O4 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 being underlined. Her perfection of balance pro- 
 duces perfection of emphasis." 
 
 Lily was delighted. She looked at her neighbour. 
 His voice was booming. "She had no range. 
 Tragedy was not even a word to her." 
 
 "Tragedy is hardly more than a word to the peo- 
 ple who use it most often," retorted Jane's cham- 
 pion heatedly. "You use a large canvas and perhaps 
 you take the world in even though you be a mere 
 scene painter. No one can fake a cameo if it is not 
 perfect. It is nothing. 
 
 "Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat 
 in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If 
 you have not felt that you have not lived. Pity is 
 essential." Lily felt an ever-growing irritation, but 
 she was quite incapable of plunging into the con- 
 versation. After all she had nothing against pity. 
 
 "Mr. Severn has always been a knight-errant," 
 said Rosemary's mother pacifically. 
 
 Severn knight-errant Mrs. Dearborn's mind 
 was in a whirl. For one overwhelming moment she 
 thought she was going to faint. Surely it was too 
 horrible to be true. This man beside her the sub- 
 stance of her dreams whose memory had warmed her 
 during all these bleak, barren years'? Bitterness 
 welled up within her. 
 
 "I don't think you remember me. My name is
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 105 
 
 Lily." Her voice was very clear and low and cold. 
 
 He looked at her now and she thought she saw 
 a look of consternation, of fear almost (perhaps she 
 was exaggerating) cross his face. His voice had 
 changed. 
 
 "Lily," he said "my dear. I have thought about 
 you so much, so often. Are you happy? Tell me?" 
 
 "I am the sort of woman you have always written 
 about." 
 
 "It had to be so," he said. A new wave of irrita- 
 tion swept over her at his complacent acceptance of 
 her unhappiness. Her life was a testimonial to his 
 attitude, a piece of evidence, an added proof that 
 he was right. She wondered if he ever forgave 
 people for being happy. Capitalized misfortune 
 she remembered Rosemary's phrase and his aft was 
 the interest on it. How clearly she was thinking! 
 She never seemed to have thought clearly before. 
 She had not disappointed him. She too had been a 
 failure. An icy curiosity came over her. "Are you 
 married'?" she asked. 
 
 "Yes. She was the wife of a a drunkard. I 
 ran away with her and I hope I have been able to 
 bring a little brightness into her life." 
 
 No impulse even there. Lily was beginning to 
 feel flippant. "It had to be so, v she said as they 
 got up from the table. 
 
 But as she drove back to her hotel, (she had
 
 1O6 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 danced till 3) she felt an emptiness she had never 
 before known. 
 
 "Poor Rosemary, planning a romance and killing 
 one," she mused. And 'then, "How nice. I haven't 
 an illusion left in the world. I feel so care-free." 
 
 The next day she returned to Cumberland. All 
 the way, she thought of her home, her dog, her won- 
 derful, herbaceous border her Princess of Wales 
 violets, the gardenias and poinsettias that were to be 
 the pride of her winter conservatory. She must try 
 to have a lot of flowers ready for Tom when he got 
 home from India for Christmas. She did love him 
 so. 
 
 She thought of Charles and how he would be at 
 the station with the dog-cart and two spaniels. He 
 would be having a joke with the station-master 
 probably an old joke which had long ago lost its 
 point, but which was all the more significant for that. 
 He would give her a resounding kiss and toss her up 
 into the dog-cart. "Light as a feather," he would 
 say "figure of a girl of eighteen." 
 
 Charles was gloriously fixed and reliable (there 
 was a time when she had called it stationary and 
 monotonous) ; he was so clumsy and so faithful and 
 so good in a way, too, she felt him helpless in his 
 hopeless inability to express himself or understand 
 her. The thought of his helplessness touched her. 
 She smiled tenderly. A curiously glowing feeling
 
 THE SUCCESSOR IOJ 
 
 was round her heart. Could she did she love 
 Charles? 
 
 The train drew up at the station. Happily, 
 eagerly, like a young bride she looked out of the 
 windows. A sickening fear clutched her heart. . . . 
 No, there he was there were the spaniels there 
 was the station-master. An unreasoning joy pos- 
 sessed her. She darted out of the carriage and threw 
 herself with a defiant gesture of abandon into her 
 husband's arms. 
 
 "I am glad to be home," she whispered. 
 
 Her radiant smile surprised even the station-mas- 
 ter. "There is no place like home," she said to him. 
 He had never heard her talk like that before. 
 
 Charles tossed her into the dog-cart and they 
 drove through the cornfields, a red-gold earth and a 
 red-gold sky. He talked about the crops and she 
 drank in the beauty of the evening and told herself 
 what a fine, simple man he was. She didn't listen to 
 what he was saying. . . . 
 
 "I want to look lovely," she said to her maid. 
 
 Robbins was amazed. Her mistress didn't usually 
 want to look lovely alone in Cumberland. She put 
 on a silvery tea-gown and white jasmine in her hair 
 and in her bosom. "You look topping," said 
 Charles; and she flushed with pleasure. 
 
 During dinner he told her all the news. Of how
 
 1O8 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 little milk Pansy was giving, and that Miss Mar- 
 joribanks wanted to marry the curate. "How splen- 
 did !" said Lily. "Does she love him?' 
 
 "I suppose so," Charles was doubtful "but old- 
 maids can't be choosers." His hearty laugh rang 
 out: "He's got no chin you know, so I don't suppose 
 he has a dog's chance of escaping." 
 
 After dinner they sat on the terrace under a red- 
 gold harvest moon. Suddenly she sat down on his 
 knee. 
 
 "Charles, do you very much wish you had mar- 
 ried a different sort of woman*?" 
 
 He felt very elated, very shy, very nonplussed. 
 "My dear, at the bottom, you know there is only 
 you." 
 
 This his confession of faithfulness and infidelity. 
 
 That night she wrote : 
 
 Dear Hilary: 
 
 I want to tell you that meeting you last night 
 brought me great happiness. 
 
 L.D.
 
 XII 
 AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 
 
 DOES it disturb you if I read?" 
 "Not a bit, but don't wake me up when you 
 put the light out." 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Good-night my darling." 
 
 "Good-night my darling." 
 
 "Bless you Say bless you." 
 
 "Why? Because it means I am not going to say 
 anything more?" 
 
 "Ah, if it only meant that!" 
 
 He was bantering her. 
 
 "Do you love me?" 
 
 As she asked the question she was conscious that 
 it was serious, terribly serious. He wouldn't know 
 that. He would simply think it was her usual ridicu- 
 lous demand for verbal assurances. 
 
 "God how I have loved you!" 
 
 "But you do still love me?" 
 
 "Of course, goose, good-night." 
 
 "Bless you Say bless you." 
 
 "Bless you. Swear not to wake me up when you 
 put the light out." 
 
 "I swear." 
 
 109
 
 11O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 He turned over and was fast asleep in a moment. 
 
 She watched him. Only a year ago he would 
 have been tingling with awakeness at having her 
 there beside him. He would have been trembling 
 with passion forcibly controlled into tenderness. Or 
 it might have broken loose as it sometimes had done. 
 . . . She hadn't liked it. How could one like it 
 unless one were completely merged in it*? But pas- 
 sion had seemed to her an inevitable part of the love 
 that she had craved for, and now it had ceased to 
 be a permanent state and become an intermittent 
 function. Did she want it back? Surely not. And 
 yet she wanted the guarantee. She was wretchedly 
 unconvinced by the present state of affairs which 
 were just what she had longed for a year ago. 
 Suddenly he turned and taking her in his arms he 
 crushed her to him with an almost mad violence. 
 Brutally he pressed her lips with his until they 
 parted with the pain arid all the time he murmured 
 strange appeals and strange demands. She was 
 frightened and fascinated. Never before had she 
 felt so helpless, so impotent, so dominated. Her 
 body was limp and she had no control over her 
 limbs. Her will power, too, was oozing away. 
 Gradually his hold relaxed. He almost fell away 
 from her. She was too dazed to speak. He turned 
 round with a deep sigh and began the regular 
 breathing of untroubled sleep. She lay awake think-
 
 AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 111 
 
 ing. So it wasn't dead, just suppressed. It had 
 come back and she liked it. Thank God, she prayed 
 exultantly, as she fell into a radiant sleep. 
 
 "It was so strange," he said next morning. "I 
 dreamt of a woman who was once my mistress, I 
 haven't seen her for years and then I thought I 
 saw you watching me and gradually both pf you 
 faded away and I slept the sleep of the just." 
 
 "The sleep of a husband?" 
 
 He must have heard the bitterness she couldn't 
 quite keep out of her voice. 
 
 "Of a lover," he said smiling at her. 
 
 But she shook her head.
 
 XIII 
 THE OLD STORY 
 
 I HAVE everything in the world to make me 
 happy," Margaret stated to herself miserably 
 and proceeded to make an inventory of all of those 
 ingredients that so resolutely refused to merge into 
 contentment. "I have the most delightful hus- 
 band." Her mind dwelt on Michael, his immense 
 charm, his beautiful manners, the quietly valuable 
 quality of his brain, the fact that if breeding 
 meant anything at all it meant him the fastidi- 
 ous aristocrat to whom all moral lapses were lapses 
 of taste, who believed in public service, who de- 
 lighted in human nature, who ate and drank and 
 gambled and made love, endowing each in turn with 
 
 his own indefinable distinction and whose form 
 
 of relaxation she couldn't understand it was sec- 
 ond rate women, girls under twenty, chandeliers, 
 rag-time, restaurants. Shooting and fishing too, of 
 course, golf and racquets, but a Cabinet Minister 
 under 45, with a brilliant present, a still more bril- 
 liant future, no money and estates which are an 
 entailed liability has more time by night than 
 by day. 
 
 She remembered the time when she had first 
 
 112
 
 THE OLD STORY 
 
 known him. She had been a girl under twenty, the 
 girl under twenty she sometimes felt it seemed ri- 
 diculous and remote now and his wife had looked 
 so much older than he did. He had fallen passion- 
 ately in love with her, irresistibly, at first sight. She 
 had only discovered it much later and it had come as 
 a great shock, a nervous shock, a moral shock. Those 
 were the days of her youth, her hardness, glorious 
 days of untempted intolerance and absolute standards 
 of right and wrong. She hadn't been very critical of 
 other people, only very proud of her own rigid fas- 
 tidiousness, her crisp cold purity, the effortless ease 
 with which she kept to the narrowest of paths. She 
 had felt crumpled and tarnished by his passion and 
 she hadn't forgiven him easily. The sight of his 
 wife had made her feel guilty and tender, miserable 
 and ill at ease. Him, she could not bear to see ; it 
 got on her nerves to be in a room with him and the 
 humble mute appeal in his eyes moved he*r alter- 
 nately to pity and rage. All the laughter had gone 
 out of their relationship and it had become an im- 
 possible thing. His wife had been very gentle, very 
 loving. It had surprised her. Ann Truro was a 
 narrow, passionate, concentrated woman, who loved 
 her husband and children with a fierce jealous love. 
 Farouche and uncompromising, with the shyness of 
 a wild animal, she wrapped up her intense sensitive- 
 ness in layers of cold reserve. She reminded Mar-
 
 114 l HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 garet of bleak magnificent moor lands with sudden 
 headstrong rushes of water. There was something 
 elemental about her which peeped through the grave 
 dignity of the mediseval chatelaine. You could see 
 two pictures of her in one she was the centre of 
 embroidering ladies and humming spinning-wheels, 
 in the other you saw her knee deep in wet heather 
 battling undaunted with wind and rain. In neither 
 was there a place artistically for Michael, the de- 
 lightful quizzical man of the world who looked with 
 tender amusement at the colliding forces of life, who 
 never denounced because he never believed, who 
 knew no disillusionment because he had known no 
 illusions. Examining his fellow creatures with the 
 dispassionate scientific delight of an etymologist, his 
 sympathy appeared perfect because of the perfec- 
 tion of his understanding. The doors and windows 
 of his mind were always open and his psychological 
 hospitality reaped a rich harvest. He himself ob- 
 served a rigid code of loyalty, devotion, hard work, 
 courage, disinterestedness. This was his only form 
 of arrogance and intolerance. He resolutely set him- 
 self a far higher standard than he would allow to 
 the rest of the world. 
 
 Michael loved an open house where his friends, his 
 acquaintances, his enemies and his oddities could 
 congregate at all hours and smoke till you could only
 
 THE OLD STORY 
 
 see dim blurred faces and talk till your head went 
 round like a piano stool. 
 
 Bewildered and miserable, Ann would sit in a 
 rocking-chair in a corner, aloof and stiff, while waves 
 of banter and laughter and wit broke over the room 
 but always short of her. She knew it was her own 
 fault but she couldn't help it. She would sit think- 
 ing of the old days when they had loved one an- 
 other with an all embracing, all-excluding love, of 
 how they had walked hand-in-hand over the hills 
 at night dreaming of their wonderful star-lit future. 
 
 She loved him just as much now though, God 
 knew, she hated this chandelier-lit menagerie. "I 
 suppose the stars are still outside," she thought 
 bitterly and people said, "What a difficult trying 
 wife poor Michael has got." 
 
 She had never become accustomed to her hus- 
 band's love of very young girls. She had always 
 been jealous of them and hated them till Margaret 
 Margaret the radiant, the irrepressible, the irresist- 
 ible, gay and gurgling and bubbling, kitten-like, 
 flower-like, entrancing, enchanting. Ann had found 
 herself dragged forcibly into the rough and tumble 
 of wits in her own house, forced out of her dark box 
 on to the stage, made to enjoy herself. She had come 
 to love Margaret with the hungry loneliness with 
 which she loved her own children. And then one 
 day this chosen child came to her white, wan, wide-
 
 Il6 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 eyed, listless, limp and forlorn, very pathetic in 
 her extinguished sunshine. Ann realised what had 
 happened and she felt a rage with her husband that 
 had nothing personal in it but was rather outraged 
 mother-love. 
 
 Margaret didn't come often after that only just 
 often enough to keep up appearances. What appear- 
 ances, she sometimes wondered 1 ? She was sure that 
 Ann knew what had happened but was prevented by 
 loyalty to her husband from hinting at it. Michael 
 she thought it odd still liked seeing her. Every- 
 thing about her was loaded with significance for 
 him the intonations of her voice, her queer little 
 gestures (every time she moved her hands he thought 
 they were touching him and he felt a little shiver 
 go down his spine) the way she turned her head. It 
 seemed strange to her that he could bear the sus- 
 pension of their old intimacy, the perfunctory nerv- 
 ous commonplaces of their intercourse. She was too 
 young to know that loving her as he did her insight, 
 her sympathy, her wit were nothing to him. If she 
 talked about the weather or Bradshaw it was all the 
 same. He only wanted to see her, to hear her, to 
 touch her, to know that she was there, to weave pat- 
 terns of her into his dreams. 
 
 Every visit to his house was misery to her. Cov- 
 ered from head to foot in armour she would plunge 
 into battle, talking in what seemed to her a strange
 
 THE OLD STORY 
 
 hard voice, very brilliant, very witty with a bright- 
 ness that was centuries away from her old flames 
 and shadows. 
 
 Michael would smile at her with that charming 
 smile she knew so well, his eyes all wrinkled up, teas- 
 ing her, laughing at her, pretending to trip her up 
 as he rushed her along. His whimsical reception of 
 her enthusiasms made them seem a little ridiculous, 
 he shrugged civilly at her moral indignation to 
 hide a yawn. Her brain that had attracted him so 
 much when he first knew her had become quite irrele- 
 vant. Perhaps, he thought, it had always been her 
 triumphant youth that had swept him off his feet. 
 His mind played with the amusing thfsis was 
 youth a part of her just an item or was she the 
 ambassadress of youth 4 ? 
 
 In all their discussions Ann passionately cham- 
 pioned Margaret. Michael felt a certain distaste for 
 their alliance, it offended his taste and he blamed his 
 wife for it Margaret after all was so young. . . . 
 
 Again that confounded word ; he really must exor- 
 cise it, he certainly wasn't old enough for it to have 
 become an obsession. The two women liking one 
 another was after all a convenience but in a way he 
 loved them both too much to enjoy .that view. Ann 
 was his wife, the mother of his children and Mar- 
 garet was no more than a child. . . . Their associa- 
 tion was repellent to him and he was angry with them
 
 Il8 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 both. And then quite suddenly Ann died all in a 
 moment of heart failure. Michael was miserable. 
 
 A hundred old forgotten pictures of their court- 
 ship flashed back into his memory, of their honey- 
 moon, of those awful hours when his wife was en- 
 during the tortures of the damned giving birth to his 
 child. He remembered, too, little old forgotten 
 jokes, irrelevant, unimportant things that they had 
 laughed at together, all the strange adhesive inti- 
 macies of their common life. The old nearness that 
 the living woman had so yearned for came back 
 now that she was gone. It had come back without 
 her. 
 
 For a year Michael plunged into work, refused to 
 see his friends, shut himself up with his remorse 
 and his children. Then the sight of almond blossom 
 and the smell of lilac lured him back into life. On 
 his way home from his office he loitered, he smiled to 
 himself, he hummed. Suddenly he thought of Mar- 
 garet. He went straight to her. 
 
 * # * * * * * 
 
 Three months later she was his wife. She never 
 could understand just why she had married him. 
 She had never been in love with him and he only 
 touched her physically at all when he was on her 
 nerves. She couldn't surely be fool enough to feel 
 that he was a legacy from Ann, and she certainly 
 didn't particularly want to be a mother to his chil-
 
 THE OLD STORY 
 
 dren children that were, she reflected, so particu- 
 larly, so essentially not her children. And yet she 
 had accepted him. He had played such a part in her 
 life, had been such a part of it. He seemed to have 
 become inextricably woven into the pattern of her 
 fate. She had felt a dummy in the hands of Provi- 
 dence and Providence had been allied to him. She 
 could never quite understand why she had felt so 
 will-tied. Her family and friends had been de- 
 lighted. Michael was always so charming to every- 
 one, so considerate and how brilliant, what a won- 
 derful career, the family jewels too were so amusing 
 in their old settings, she mustn't dream of changing 
 them. Of course, it was a pity that the ancestral 
 home had to be let but one couldn't have everything. 
 Step-children, too, were perhaps rather a trial (so 
 tiresome that he should have had a son by his first 
 wife) but such a responsibility, almost one might 
 say a privilege, an opportunity. To all of this 
 Margaret assented listlessly though in her gayer 
 moments she wondered if "amusing" was really the 
 last word on the huge crescents and stars, the pearls 
 like old teeth, and the massive cameos that formed 
 the family jewels. That Michael was charming, 
 considerate and brilliant, she couldn't deny. . . . 
 She couldn't deny it to-day any more than she could 
 deny it then. 
 
 "I have the most delightful husband," she re-
 
 12O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 peated in a dissatisfied voice and in evidence of 
 what she was saying he walked into the room. 
 
 "My dear, you will be late for dinner." He took 
 her hand and kissed it. "Where is your maid 1 ?" 
 
 "She has gone out." 
 
 A certain tonelessness in her voice struck him. 
 
 "Are you tired?" 
 
 "A little tired." 
 
 "You look it." 
 
 Somehow that was thejast straw. She felt near 
 tears. If only he had said that she looked well, 
 that she looked fresh, that she looked pretty. Any- 
 thing to pull her out of this morass of discouragement 
 into which she was sinking. 
 
 "I think," he said stroking her hair, "that you 
 need a little country. Why should you stay in Lon- 
 don in this hot weather 1 ? You must not let me be 
 too selfish, you know." 
 
 A wave of hopelessness came over her. She longed 
 to say : 
 
 "I don't want anything except to be wanted. I 
 long for you to make ceaseless, impossible demands 
 on me," but instead she said : 
 
 "I think it would do me good. I think I will go 
 away for a few days." 
 
 She heard him whistling in his bath. How young 
 he was! She laughed; he was twenty years older 
 than she was. As they walked downstairs he took
 
 THE OLD STORY 121 
 
 her arm and pressed it a little. "Darling," he mur- 
 mured. Again she wanted to cry. She wished she 
 were not too tired to laugh. They had people din- 
 ing and people coming in after dinner. Margaret, 
 unlike Ann, liked entertaining, was amused by con- 
 trasts and enjoyed oddities. But to-night she felt so 
 listless that each remark she made was like lifting 
 a heavy weight. "The dumb-bell stage," she called 
 it. 
 
 The lovely daughter of Michael's secretary was 
 dining, thrilled to be there, to be able to laugh and 
 talk with Michael. Margaret knew that her pres- 
 ence subdued her a little and tried to counteract 
 the impression. She encouraged Ruby's sallies and 
 laughed at them till the girl felt quite at her ease 
 and rattled on, her conversation studded with allu- 
 sions to little private jokes, and references to events 
 of which Margaret was unconscious. 
 
 "Was I like that?" she wondered. "I don't think 
 I can have been or Ann wouldn't have loved me, 
 but perhaps it was only that she was a more generous 
 woman than I am." 
 
 "My wife can't stand him, can you dear heart 1 ?" 
 she heard Michael say and looking up she caught 
 a startled expression on Ruby's face. And with a 
 rush of remembrance it came back to her the first 
 time that she had heard him say "dear heart" to 
 Ann and what a strange unaccountable shock it had
 
 122 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 given her. Afterwards she had listened for his terms 
 of endearment and whenever he had been lover-like 
 with his wife it had seemed to her a Judas kiss. 
 She was sure that was not what Ruby felt rather 
 the child was suddenly struck with the thought that 
 these two people in front of her were not mere offi- 
 cial connections, pieces of furnitures in one another's 
 lives, linked together by a name, but that they had 
 once been lovers, eloquent and tongue-tied and on 
 fire and that there was still something left even if it 
 was only a word. After dinner the room filled with 
 people and smoke and noise. Ruby sat on a sofa 
 with Michael, her eyes were shining, her cheeks were 
 flushed and she was bending towards him. 
 
 Margaret sat in a corner in a rocking-chair think- 
 ing. "May I come and talk to you, Lady Truro?" a 
 man brought up his chair. "After all," thought 
 Margaret, "I am very accessible." 
 
 "You don't usually sit right away here in this cor- 
 ner. It reminds me . . ." he bit his lip. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 "It reminds you of Ann. You were going to say"? 
 She always sat here." 
 
 "Yes, of course. How silly of me to have stopped. 
 iYou were one of the few people she loved I re- 
 member the way her face lit up when you came 
 into the room. You always dragged her forward.
 
 THE OLD STORY 123 
 
 Poor Ann! She had a difficult nature and she was 
 somehow always out of things." 
 
 Margaret smiled again. 
 
 "She had a charming husband." 
 
 "So have you." 
 
 "Yes," she said, "the same husband."
 
 XIV 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
 MY father was one of the most brilliant men I 
 have ever known but as he refused to choose 
 any of the ordinary paths of mental activity his 
 name has remained a family name when it should 
 have become more exclusively his own. If anything 
 my mother's famous beauty cast far more lustre on 
 it than his genius which preferred to bask in the 
 sunshine of intimacy or recline indolently in the 
 shady backwaters of privacy and leisure. And yet 
 in a way he was an adventurer or rather an adven- 
 turous scientist. He was often called cynical but 
 that was not true he was far too dispassionate, too 
 little of a sentimentalist to be tempted by inverted 
 sentimentalism. Above all things he was a collector 
 a collector of impressions. His psychological 
 bibelots were not for everyone. Some indeed lay 
 open in the vitime of his everyday conversation but 
 many more lay hidden in drawers opened only for 
 the elect. 
 
 Undoubtedly, in a way, my mother was one of his 
 masterpieces. Her beauty seemed to be enhanced by 
 every hour and every season. At forty suddenly her 
 hair had gone snow white. The primrose, the daffo- 
 
 124
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 125 
 
 dil, the flame, the gold, the black, the emerald, the 
 ruby of her youth gave way to grey and silver, pale 
 jade and faint turquoise, shell pink and dim laven- 
 der. Her loveliness had shifted. The hours of the 
 day conspired to set her. The hard coat and skirt, 
 the high collar, the small hat, the neat veil of 
 morning, the caressing charmeuse that followed, the 
 trailing chiffon mysteries of her tea-gown, the white 
 velvet or the cloth of silver that launched her tri- 
 umphantly at night, who was to choose between 
 them 1 ? Summer and winter followed suit. Whether 
 you saw her emerging from crisp organdy or cling- 
 ing crepe de chine, stiff grey astrakan or melting 
 chinchilla always it was the same. This moment 
 you said to yourself "She has reached the climax of 
 her loveliness." 
 
 My father delighted in perfection. He had dis- 
 covered it in her and promptly made it his own. I 
 don't know if he ever regretted the unfillable quality 
 of her emptiness. Rather I think it amused him to 
 see the violent passions she inspired, to hear her low 
 thrilling voice weigh down her meaningless murmurs 
 with significance. To many of her victims the very 
 incompleteness of her sentences was a form of divine 
 loyalty. One young poet had described her soul as a 
 fluttering, desperate bird beating its wings on the 
 bars of her marvellous loveliness. At this her lazy 
 smile looked very wise. She thought my father
 
 126 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 an ideal husband. He was always right about her 
 clothes and after all he was the greatest living expert 
 on her beauty. Obviously he loved her but well he 
 didn't love her inconveniently. Her attitude to- 
 wards me was different. I was an accident. A bit 
 of unchosen furniture in her life, she who chose 
 everything so carefully. While she could still dress 
 me as a Kate Greenaway, she could enjoy me but 
 there followed a barren period till I grew up and 
 she could group me again. I was so immense that I 
 more particularly underlined her fragility and slight- 
 ness and she looked so young that my being her son 
 rather enhanced than detracted from her youth. 
 
 So when I left Oxford the tableau vivant was re- 
 established. 
 
 My father was the most delightful talker I have 
 ever met. He could juggle with the moment and fish 
 fancies out of the most unpromising topics. With 
 him soap and water inevitably turned into rainbow- 
 tinted bubbles. Nor was he without the heavy artil- 
 lery of knowledge. He would mass his infantry of 
 facts to reinforce the light cavalry of his wit, and 
 the dash and elan of his brilliance would sometimes 
 mask the depth of his scholarship and understanding. 
 
 I have often wondered how a man of so many 
 parts could have turned his life to so little account. 
 Once I murmured something about his wasting his 
 great gifts.
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
 "What is wasting your time?" he asked. "Rush- 
 ing about and fraying your nerves in order to be 
 called a man of action*? Leisure is a vocation in- 
 vented for people who can think." 
 
 The two things my father really loved were music 
 and myself. But I always felt somehow that there 
 must have been someone else, someone all satisfying. 
 I don't know what my conviction came from, per- 
 haps it was the feeling that without some strong, 
 fast current, deep and hidden through it had to be, 
 bits of him would have frozen. My mother could 
 never have stirred the real man and the fact that he 
 stood her so graciously, admired her so unfailingly, 
 showed that she had never mattered enough even to 
 be a disappointment. Once you had ceased to be 
 surprised at her having borne a child so incredible 
 did it seem that she should ever have had any con- 
 tact with reality you ceased to think of her at all 
 except when you drew in your breath at her dazzling 
 beauty. But the fact that she was so easily "placed" 
 psychologically made me wonder all the more about 
 that inner life of my father's of which no murmur or 
 hint had ever reached me but in the existence of 
 which I so unfalteringly believed. 
 
 And then, one day, quite by accident, when I was 
 looking for something in his room, I came across an 
 old photograph. It was shiny and thick with the 
 photographer's name at the bottom in gold and no
 
 128 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 artist had arranged the lighting. It seemed, in fact, 
 hardly to have emerged from the daguerreotype 
 stage. But it struck me partly because of my father's 
 loathing of photographs and partly because of the 
 "sitter's" face. She was holding on a shawl, her very 
 long fingers clutching it a little nervously while 
 her heavy lidded eyes peered through the curtain 
 of her lashes with the expression of a watcher look- 
 ing unseen into a room. Her big curly mouth had 
 square corners and her nostrils seemed cut out in 
 cardboard. Her chin was square, her forehead wide 
 and her hair looked lighter than her skin. I felt like 
 a detective on his first case suddenly coming across 
 a clue of first rate importance. How was I to follow 
 it up? I didn't want to appear to be prying into my 
 father's private concerns, still less did I want to shut 
 off the possibility of a confidence from him by some 
 indiscreet question. But I was burning with curios- 
 ity and at the best of times I am not particularly 
 patient. 
 
 After several days of fruitless hope that providence 
 would at least provide me with an apple to pick 
 (Eve seemed to me to have had all the advantages) 
 I plunged desperately. My father and I were sitting 
 smoking by a particularly rosy and welcoming fire 
 and he was talking about love and love affairs and 
 marriage lightly but with all his infinite insight, 
 his wide human wisdom.
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
 "Father forgive me," I floundered, "has no one 
 ever, hasn't anyone, I mean, ever really meant any- 
 thing, mattered*?" 
 
 He looked at me, wiped his glasses, smiling a 
 little at my discomfiture. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "I have loved one woman in my 
 life. I used the word love," he added quietly, "in 
 the sense in which it means everything that it can 
 mean." 
 
 There was a silence and then, unable to control 
 myself: 
 
 "Could you bear to tell me about her"? What she 
 was like?" I wondered why I used the past tense. 
 
 "She was more alive than anyone I have ever 
 met. With more 'follow through' in everything. It 
 sounds a ridiculous phrase to use but somehow 
 ordinary words don't describe her. When you were 
 with her everything became so thrilling, seemed so 
 worth while. You looked at the world through her 
 eyes and you saw miracles all round you. The com- 
 monplace; the dull, the everyday had disappeared. 
 She believed that people were interesting and won- 
 derful and they became it. She wanted people to 
 be happy and she made them happy with her 
 charity really did mean love. She was always 
 preyed on and tired out by the dozens of worthless 
 people who clung to her," his voice had changed, the
 
 13O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 old memory of that irritation the irritation of not 
 having her to himself had come back to him. 
 
 "And then of course there was her art her won- 
 derful art. The world was at her feet. 'I wish 
 it were at my side' she would say with her lovely 
 whimsical smile. She wasn't beautiful and oh, so 
 far from pretty, but her features had a fascinat- 
 ing way of playing with one another as if her eye- 
 brows gave a hint to her eyes which in their time 
 whispered a cue to her mouth. She was so lithe and 
 strong and supple with an indolent grace that masked 
 it. What is the good of my fumbling on trying to 
 describe magic? If you could have seen her but 
 you never will. She was Life." And he got up, 
 smiled, lit his candle and went to bed. 
 
 I tried to piece the evidence together. The 
 world was at her feet her wonderful art. She must 
 have been an actress or a singer. The "world" is 
 not "at the feet" of writers. 
 
 Surreptitiously I searched London for photographs 
 of old artists but it seemed as if conspiracy had ar- 
 ranged to conceal my lady with the shawl. Through 
 many a drawer of musty unwanted postcards I bur- 
 rowed but always she eluded me. Any thick, shiny 
 photograph drew me like a magnet but in vain. 
 Discouraged, I prayed to providence, and one after- 
 noon my prayer was answered. 
 
 My mother was coming down to Roehampton to
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
 watch me play polo or rather to hold her court under 
 the trees, and I was to pick her up at her corsetiere's. 
 I arrived at the appointed time and settled down 
 in the front room to wait, when, lo and behold, I 
 found on the wall a wire entanglement packed with 
 photographs Isolde and the Merry Widow, Lady 
 Teazle and Mary Queen of Scots, with a generous 
 sprinkling of ladies in picture hats and patches, 
 looked down at me. Eyes outsmiled teeth, teeth out- 
 shone eyes, while large sprawling writings assured 
 the world that Mme. Isabelle was a paragon among 
 corsetieres. 
 
 Trembling I got up shyly with a feeling of dedica- 
 tion. I looked and there between Boadicea and a 
 pierrette was my lady of the shawl. I thought I 
 saw an amused glance of recognition behind that 
 thick fringe of eyelashes, but I was too excited to be 
 sure. 
 
 "I am so sorry to have kept you waiting." At 
 that moment my mother's immaculate perfection 
 was to me nothing but a white blur. I tried to force 
 my voice to sound natural. 
 
 "Who is that?" I asked in the hoarse tones of a 
 hero in melodrama. 
 
 "Oh don't you know? But of course you are too 
 young to have heard of her. That was Maddalena 
 Moro, some people thought her the greatest singer 
 of her age."
 
 132 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 All the things I had ever heard of her crowded 
 into my reeling mind but there was only one clear 
 thought in my head. 
 
 "Why do you say 'was/ Is she dead?" 
 
 My mother shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 "I wonder. Who knows"? Those people disap- 
 pear and one doesn't hear of them any more. She 
 retired suddenly at forty. No one knew why. Her 
 voice was as beautiful as ever, I believe. You should 
 ask your father about her. He knew her quite well, 
 I think." 
 
 "Knew her quite well." So my mother had known 
 nothing, had guessed nothing, had suspected nothing. 
 
 "I thought her rather an ugly woman though she 
 was certainly magnetic. She seemed to look through 
 your clothes and talked of such odd things. I think 
 it is so very ill-bred to be socially disconcerting and 
 that she certainly was. And then her movements 
 were so strange and sudden, not at all suited to pri- 
 vate life. But it always seems to me a mistake to 
 see those stage people out of their setting. And 
 then defrauded out of her customary incense, 'Do 
 you like this dress? I am not sure about it,' but 
 when I gave her my quite sincere opinion she re- 
 laxed into the purr of a satisfied Persian cat." 
 
 "The greatest singer I have ever heard?" the critic 
 was delightfully conscious that everyone was listen-
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 133 
 
 ing to him. "Why I think I fell plump for Madda- 
 lena Moro. Her colouratura was like a girl walk- 
 ing into the garden before breakfast and singing for 
 sheer love of the birds and the dew. Her trills were 
 just little patches of high spirits, little private compe- 
 titions with a particular lark. And her tragic singing 
 was marvellous too. It had the inevitability of fate. 
 You never felt that she could have used any other 
 word or any other note to express what she wanted 
 to. She had that rarest of all gifts, she always 
 seemed to be improvising." 
 
 "And why did she retire so young?" I asked. 
 
 "No one knew. I remember her saying to me 
 once, 'I know I shall go on singing till my voice is 
 cracked, but you must tell me when it becomes too 
 bad to be true. You see I simply can't stop. I love 
 
 it so.' ' 
 
 "And when did you see her last?" 
 
 "When? I don't remember the exact date. She 
 had been singing the 'Queen of the Night' with more 
 abandon, with more control than ever but then that 
 was the impression one carried away each time that 
 one heard her. I recall that particular occasion 
 because an extraordinary thing happened. She sang 
 out of tune three times. It was so incredible, so 
 grotesque that I realised that she must be ill, so I 
 went round, anxious about her, full of sympathy. I 
 knew exactly what she must be feeling about it.
 
 134 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 Her ear was so perfect. She was one of the few 
 singers I have ever seen who was not only an artist 
 that is rare enough but even a musician. When I 
 reached her dressing room she was flushed and elated, 
 with shining eyes and a peculiar, relaxed position 
 that was with her a symbol of past strain and present 
 triumph. I came up full of sympathy. 'Never,' she 
 said, 'have I sung like that. Is it not so, Rein?' ' 
 
 " 'Of course not,' I said, and she smiled, that 
 lovely radiant smile that made you feel as if she were 
 throwing you a bit of life. Something undreamt of, 
 something alive, something real, something fragrant. 
 She gave me her hand and she said, 'I knew that to- 
 night you would be with me.' It seemed to me so 
 pathetic this night the first on which she had 
 ever failed was after all the night of her friends. 
 I murmured something commonplace about being 
 always with her when she would accept me as a com- 
 panion an admirer, a confessor, a friend any- 
 thing. I knew of course that she had only one 
 lover" 
 
 "Oh, do tell us about him Name, Name!" 
 There was a chorus. 
 
 "Oh," the critic caught sight of me and blushed, 
 "all that is ancient history." 
 
 "Tell me," I asked him later in an undertone, 
 sacrificing my father for the first and only time in
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
 135 
 
 my life, "where is she now. I have special reasons 
 for wanting to know." 
 
 Doubtfully he looked at me. "I have not seen 
 her for many years," he said. "She married an 
 Italian doctor. This is her address. Can I trust 
 you?" he hesitated. "She is, I think, happy and 
 probably she is at peace." 
 
 "I do not want her resurrection," I said. "I am 
 visiting the shrine of the dead." 
 
 "Peace be to her," he said, and I thanked him. 
 ******* 
 
 It was early April and the Easter holidays had 
 begun. I had quite made up my mind to go to Italy 
 but I was nervous and embarrassed about mentioning 
 it. The things that go on in the innermost recesses 
 of your heart have a disconcerting way of making 
 you feel transparent. And in this case I had my 
 father's super-human acumen to deal with. The 
 very name Madeleine which belonged to a plain 
 cousin of ours to whom my mother was occasionally 
 "kind" and who always spent unnoticed weeks in our 
 midst, would make me start and give me the ridicu- 
 lous feeling of being on the brink of a blush. 
 
 And then one morning, very casually much too 
 casually it seemed to me I said, "I am thinking of 
 going to Italy," and my father said, "That seems 
 an excellent idea," and my mother shrugged her
 
 136 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 shoulders and thought it very rude to chuck a lot of 
 engagements for a whim. 
 
 A week later I was living in a village inn basking 
 in the sunshine surrounded by smiling teeth and 
 laughing eyes, handkerchiefed heads and bare feet. 
 The country was covered with furry anemones and 
 outbursts of blossom. The weather was behaving 
 like an irrepressible coquette with a heart of gold. 
 Raucous street singing with its peculiarly poignant 
 quality kept me happily awake at night. I was go- 
 ing through one of these delightful periods without 
 to-morrow or yesterday when life is a happy island 
 cut off from birth or death. 
 
 All the time I knew that in the hills above me was 
 Maddalena's chateau with her wonderful garden 
 climbing slowly down the hill terrace by terrace. 
 The legend of her flowers was well known. They 
 never it was said allowed the earth to peep 
 through but sprawled and overlapped in riotous 
 orgies, tumbling into blazing heaps of colour. 
 
 Being at a stone's throw from my goal had sud- 
 denly and strangely sapped my curiosity. I felt no 
 initiative, no energy, no hurry, rather a sense of pro- 
 crastination a longing to ward off the approaching 
 crisis. 
 
 But time was slipping away in golden moments 
 strung on a string of idleness. I made up my mind 
 to act and taking my courage in both hands I wrote
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 137 
 
 a line to Maddalena asking whether I might go and 
 see her. 
 
 She invited me to go to supper with her on the 
 pergola if it was warm enougfy. It would, she said, 
 be a great pleasure to see me. . . . 
 
 When the night arrived, I felt a strange longing 
 to run away. I felt that I was breaking the bubble 
 .by trying to take it in my hands, that I was dragging 
 down romance into the dust by my inquisitiveness. 
 When the hour came for me to start my heart seemed 
 to be playing leap-frog, giving great irregular jumps, 
 and I felt more nervous than I have ever felt before 
 or since. 
 
 I walked slowly. The night was very dark, star- 
 less and cloudy with an ominous feeling in the air. 
 The door was opened by a magnificent looking Arab 
 dressed in snow white and I was shown into an 
 immense sala which contained the great secret of 
 emptiness and comfort, luxurious intimacy and 
 magnificent spaciousness. The light was very dim 
 but I could see huge masses of strangely mixed 
 flowers which looked as if they had grown together 
 like that a special arrangement of God's. 
 
 I could distinguish the faint outline of a white 
 figure closely draped in a shawl and the most beauti- 
 ful arm I have ever seen silhouetted against the back 
 of the sofa and falling into a cascade of long white 
 fingers. As I approached the figure rose. I held my
 
 138 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 breath and the next moment I was kissing Madda- 
 lena's hand. How shall I describe her as she etched 
 herself on to my memory 1 ? 
 
 She stood there tall and strong and supple like 
 some beautiful statue created as a vessel to hold life. 
 It was only gradually that I dared look at her face 
 and the first thing I found there was her smile the 
 sight of which must always have set a thousand 
 smiles in motion. 
 
 I remember the queer way it had of beginning 
 at one corner of her mouth and creeping slowly and 
 stealthily to the other, and then sometimes it would 
 break out simultaneously all along the line with a 
 dazzling burst of radiance. I liked it best when it 
 progressed mysteriously hardly touching her lips, like 
 an echo or a shadow of something. 
 
 Her eyes were very strange, marbled orange and 
 green, splashes of amber on a background of emerald 
 jade, and her lashes were so thick that it was some- 
 times difficult to catch the darting gleams behind 
 them. 
 
 I wish I could describe her. 
 
 Somehow it is impossible to give any idea of her 
 tingling vibrating quality. The overcharged bat- 
 tery that one felt her to be. All the electric sparks 
 of life that escaped from her, and underneath it all 
 the swift strong current, the relentless water from 
 which light is made.
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 139 
 
 That evening I was intoxicated. I didn't know 
 what I was eating, what I was saying. I felt that I 
 was some will-less mechanical performer in a dream. 
 The flickering orange light of the tall yellow candles, 
 the hard patches of magnesium made by the moon 
 on the floor, the sound of her voice, low and vel- 
 vety and drowsy as it were the soft wrapping that 
 held her wonderful treasure it all seemed woven 
 into some strange pattern of life of which I was a 
 part. 
 
 Maddalena talked of life, of love, of triumph, of 
 loneliness, of longing "What is Sehnsucht*?" she 
 said. "What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to 
 do a thing for the first time again. And that is im- 
 possible. When I love what do I want"? I want 
 never to have kissed, never to have given myself 
 before. It is in vain I say 'Never has it been like 
 this never before was I awake I was a dummy in 
 the hands of fate now I am alive.' I was shut up 
 perhaps but my outer petals were touched. Oh, my 
 God, make me again the child I was but he cannot 
 answer." 
 
 It was then I heard her voice for the first time. 
 Her marvellous voice that had suddenly burst loose 
 into this note of passion. It receded again into its 
 velvet cover and she went on more calmly. 
 
 "What are we to tell our children? How are 
 they to know that the first accidental encounter with
 
 14O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 life may take from them a treasure they will only 
 learn about in forty bitter storm-tossed years. Those 
 first gifts those shy blossomings lovely in their 
 unconsciousness are surely but the squandering of 
 something half alive, the foolish murder of a bud. 
 Oh youth is a wicked, cruel thing eating miracles 
 with its breakfast and not knowing that they are 
 not porridge." 
 
 She paused and when she began again the edge of 
 bitterness had gone from her voice. "Of course," 
 she said, "a real passion does purify you, does burn 
 up a lot of dusty old relics. You shed your past 
 experiences like a winter skin; you are renewed all 
 through. But if your imagination plays tricks with 
 you, in the very absoluteness of your surrender there 
 is a gnawing pang. 'If this were only the first 
 kiss I had ever given.' To men it is not so," she 
 added with a little smile, "to them it would appear 
 that each kiss is swollen by all the others that have 
 gone before," and with a little laugh she got up and 
 walked into the next room. 
 
 I didn't say anything. I was frightened of in- 
 terrupting her of giving the conversation a jerk. 
 
 Soon she began again. 
 
 "Middle age is the period of love," she said a little 
 sadly. "It comes over you like a fever. It is made a 
 necessity by your doubts, by all the little guarantees 
 that you have lost. When I was young I liked
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
 141 
 
 power, I liked fame, I liked great men statesmen, 
 artists, kings even I liked my horses and my jewels, 
 ball-room and chandeliers, and the murmur of my 
 name buzzing from person to person when I ap- 
 peared. It amused me to drive around Hyde Park 
 beautifully dressed, with a sunshade bursting over 
 my head. I liked flowers, not only in gardens but in 
 bouquets and vases, peaches, white grapes, caviare, 
 and champagne. I enjoyed the merry-go-round of 
 youth and success. Then your father came and I 
 cared only for him and my voice 'his' voice I 
 used to call it because he loved it. My art meant 
 much more to me after that, every note was a gift I 
 could make him and I thanked God every day very 
 humbly, very reverently for giving me such a mar- 
 vellous instrument for my love." 
 
 Suddenly, she became quite silent. A brooding 
 look in her eyes, an immobility about her whole 
 figure. 
 
 Thus we sat for what seemed to me an eternity. 
 There were a thousand things I wanted to ask. 
 When had she broken with my father and why? 
 How had she been able to give up singing, what was 
 her husband like, was she happy? They were all 
 crude, impossible questions and would look angular 
 in however many layers of subtlety I might wrap 
 them. 
 
 All my life I have been teased for asking not,
 
 142 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "Is she beautiful?" "Is she clever?' but always, "Is 
 she happy*?" I think it is in many ways the most 
 interesting thing about a person, the most complete 
 description. If you first try and get a certain sense 
 of the whole you can always disentangle the in- 
 gredients later. Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, 
 an illumination. It sets a personality. I always 
 feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some 
 and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, 
 never an accident. In a way you could never say 
 that Maddalena was "happy" or "unhappy." You 
 felt when you were with her that for the first time 
 you were in contact with "life" that she contained 
 some elemental force, some spark, some current that 
 made her a part of all the ages. 
 
 I don't know how to describe what I mean. You 
 couldn't imagine her having been born or dying, 
 having been a child or becoming an old woman. 
 There was nothing finite about her. I was obsessed 
 by the necessity of breaking the silence. If I didn't 
 I felt that gradually I should lose control of my 
 tongue and probably all of my limbs as well. I 
 must break the spell. 
 
 Abruptly, without any warning, feeling superla- 
 tively foolish, I blurted out, "Do you ever sing 
 now?" 
 
 She looked at me with wide open eyes. "No," 
 she said. "My husband could stand no rival. He
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 143 
 
 wanted our love to be everything. It has been 
 everything. He says that in my speaking voice are 
 all the songs of the world. He how shall I explain 
 it he reversed the plan of my life. Before, I had 
 tried to expand the treasures of my own life, my 
 little personal intimacies into the infinite. I sang 
 my love for your father into every opera house in the 
 world but Giovanni said, 'No, you must capture the 
 infinite and keep it tight shut in our love,' and so it 
 has been." 
 
 I imagined the jealous lover, the Italian stage 
 character caging the marvellous bird. It made me 
 angry, indignant. What right had he to keep this 
 wonderful treasure for himself. 
 
 "Giovanni is a poet," she murmured on her lips 
 his name was a caress. "He is a doctor," she added 
 with a delightful little defiant note of pride. 
 
 "Signora," I said, "I am going to make an im- 
 possible, a monstrous request. I have no right to 
 make it, it is impertinent beyond words. What 
 excuse have I to try to force the lock that reveals the 
 Holy of Holies. I am a presumptuous fool. But if 
 you've ever known what it was to feel hungry, if 
 you've ever known what it was to feel parched with 
 thirst, if you've ever known what it was to long, to 
 yearn for anything, a letter, a look, a death, that is 
 what I feel now. The whole of me is crying, 'I 
 must hear her voice once.' '
 
 144 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "I don't sing," she said smiling at my trembling 
 eagerness. 
 
 "In memory of my father, who loved you as he 
 has never loved anyone, to whom you were life itself. 
 Because of my love for him, of his love for me, open 
 this ecstasy of his to me so that there is not always 
 between us this gulf of the wonder he knew and that 
 I shall never know." 
 
 "It has been shut up so long, my voice," she said. 
 "Who knows but it has forgotten how to fly*?" And 
 then suddenly she got up, her eyes flashed, she defied 
 the universe with a gesture. 
 
 "Who says I cannot sing?" she said, and she went 
 to the piano. Slowly she rumbled out a wavelike 
 murmur of notes. "It is a man's song I must sing," 
 she said, and she burst out into the flood of passion. 
 
 "Du meine Seele, du mein Herz," she sang. 
 
 Her wonderful voice vibrating, throbbing, crashed 
 discord after discord. For a moment I thought 
 it must be a nightmare it could not be true. The 
 agony was too great. She laughed, "It has not gone, 
 my voice. Ah, it is good to sing again." She went 
 on from song to song, and by a superhuman effort of 
 will I kept my hands from my ears. And then sud- 
 denly I saw a man's white miserable strained face 
 and her husband came into the room. She did not 
 see him and he came straight to me.
 
 THE PILGRIMAGE 145 
 
 "Fool," he said in a low passionate voice, with a 
 burning bitterness in it. "She does not know. She 
 is deaf when she sings. She has lost her ear. Oh, 
 
 my secret!"
 
 XV 
 THE BALL 
 
 SHE rested before dinner or rather she lay in 
 a dark room, feeling the strings of her heart 
 and mind slowly tightening. "I mustn't get over- 
 tuned," she thought with a little smile. "I mustn't 
 get sharp," and then trying to lash her soaring day- 
 dreams to earth, "perhaps I shall never be as happy 
 as I am now," but they raced away from her and 
 circled in the air. She could hear the clock ticking 
 and her heart beating and she could wish that one 
 or the other would stop. 
 
 A feeling of sickness and faintness was gradually 
 coming over her, an even more assertive oppressive 
 sense of excitement. She wished that she could 
 break loose from time. It seemed to her an eternity 
 before her maid came. Her bath soothed her a 
 little. Some of her growing tension evaporated in 
 the warm water. She felt calmer, more at peace. 
 She thought she was dressing very slowly but her 
 trembling fingers were out of her control and it was 
 with feverish, unconscious haste that she dabbed 
 her face with powder and put meaningless, unneces- 
 sary hairpins in superfluous ineffective places. A 
 
 little stab of pleasure went through her as she put 
 
 146
 
 THE BALL 
 
 on her new pink shoes and stockings. She was glad 
 that her pink tulle dress had only just been lovingly 
 extricated from layers and layers of tissue paper, 
 "fold after fold to the fainting air," she murmured 
 as the bed was flooded with crisp rosy billows. She 
 looked at her little black satin head, the waves of 
 which seemed painted in oil, and she tucked a real 
 camellia with its dark green satin leaves, above her 
 ear. "It is the stiffest and most romantic of flow- 
 ers," she thought, "with its marvellous ballroom 
 tenue and its beautiful insolent carriage." 
 
 At last she was ready. Her dress seemed part of 
 her, waves of filmy petals from which emerged the 
 classic mouldings of her marble shoulders warm 
 and white and firm like her breasts. Her tiny head 
 was carried erect on its slender white stalk, her little 
 satin feet twinkled below the billows. She was 
 vibrating all through with electric currents of 
 ecstacy. Her eyes were shining. Colour was coming 
 and going in her cheeks; unconsciously her lips 
 curved into smiles. 
 
 When she arrived everything was already in full 
 swing. A faint background of music could occa- 
 sionally be heard through the conversation on the 
 staircase, roses and lilies of the valley competed in 
 the dizzying atmosphere, chandeliers seemed but the 
 natural extensions of rivieres and tiaras and plaques 
 velvets and satins and tinsels made puddles in the
 
 148 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 parquet, while in cool green corners low, provocative 
 laughs followed up veiled provocative glances. 
 
 A gathering recklessness seemed to be taking hold 
 of the evening defiant challenges were being defi- 
 antly accepted many an unspoken surrender was 
 tacitly asked for and tacitly given silent irrevoc- 
 able promises were being sealed without a word 
 debts of honour indeed, since even dishonour seemed 
 a small price with which to pay them. Rose floated 
 to the top of the staircase with a delightful feeling 
 that her feet had not touched the ground. Soon 
 she was whirling round the room, her body aban- 
 doned to the music, her eyes searching every corner, 
 examining each couple. 
 
 At last she saw him, but always he seemed far 
 away, at the other end of the room, caught in a 
 different stream of dancers. "When will he see 
 me?" she thought, tragedy engulfing her, and then 
 he caught her eye and bowed. She could not believe 
 that he had not touched her; she had felt a physical 
 impact and she shut her eyes to steady herself. 
 
 The music stopped. 
 
 "Shall we go out into the cool?" 
 
 She looked round and seeing him still in the room, 
 she said : 
 
 "I think I would like to stay here a moment and 
 look at the world," and then as she saw him walk 
 out again &he added:
 
 THE BALL 
 
 149 
 
 "Perhaps you are right; it is very hot." 
 
 He was sitting on a sofa, laughing and talking. 
 She tried to keep control of her eyes, not to let her 
 answers get too disjointed. At last someone came to 
 talk to his companion and he got up. Her heart 
 sang "He is coming to me," but he passed down the 
 room. 
 
 The Prince in whose honour the ball was given, 
 asked her to dance with him. She circled round and 
 round, the centre of all eyes, the envied of all 
 women. She wondered whether he saw her, what he 
 was thinking about, whether he was glad that she 
 was a success, if he realised that the woman he was 
 with would rather be dancing with the Prince, 
 whereas she, Rose, in the whole wide world only 
 wanted to be with him. 
 
 She saw him walk out on to a balcony and now 
 she was completely wretched. The night seemed full 
 of romantic possibilities, the darkness had eaten 
 him up out of her sight, she dared not think what 
 confessions the stars might not be extracting from 
 him. She could not bear to sit still for a moment, 
 she danced and danced and danced till her pink satin 
 feet were tired and dirty and her nerves gave little 
 stabbing pains on a background of leaden misery. 
 
 Again and again the Prince came to her. 
 
 "What a success that child is," she heard a 
 dowager snap out resentfully.
 
 15O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 "It is certainly her night," agreed her companion, 
 crushing his monocle into his eye. 
 
 Rose gave a weary little laugh. A thousand ages 
 of frustration weighed her down and then suddenly 
 when complete hopelessness had descended on her 
 he came. 
 
 "Will you dance with me?" he asked. 
 
 His voice lulled her to sudden peace. All the 
 raging, tearing miseries inside her suddenly subsided. 
 She took his arm as in a dream, the parquet had sud- 
 denly become a gilded cloud and her body had ceastd 
 to exist. She smiled at him as if the peace of full 
 happiness had descended on her for ever. His eyes 
 seemed to draw her in, out of the world into eternity. 
 She was conscious of nothing but his hand on her. 
 back. It grew every minute more immense and fiery 
 while her body seemed to have shrunk and become 
 a plaything that he was holding in his palm. Each 
 of his fingers was portentously alive, the pillars 
 on which the world was resting and each time he 
 moved one a little shiver of fire went through her. 
 Proudly, radiantly she looked round the room. 
 
 "Everyone is envying me," she thought. 
 
 "I don't know who that rather insignificant look- 
 ing man that Rose has got hold of now is," snapped 
 the dowager. 
 
 Round and round the room they went. 
 
 "I must take him right away before the music
 
 THE BALL 1^1 
 
 stops, or someone will snatch him from me," thought 
 Rose, "but oh ! I don't want to be out of his arms 
 ever." 
 
 "Shall we go and sit down somewhere cool?" 
 she asked him, and they walked out of the room. 
 
 He told her a story about his father and her low 
 voice was musical with her happiness. She didn't 
 mind what he talked about she only wanted him to 
 talk to her whatever interested him was the most 
 important thing in the world. He was the first per- 
 son who had ever felt anything or done anything 
 or had a father. She didn't want ever to move 
 again- 
 
 "Ah," said the Prince, "I have found you at last. 
 Will you come to supper with me*?" 
 
 A rush of disappointment and rage came over her. 
 
 "You are too kind, but I am so tired that 1 am 
 going home." 
 
 "You need a little champagne," he said, taking 
 her arm. Hopelessly she gave way, throwing behind 
 her a little glance of appeal which said "later," but 
 after supper she saw him sitting on a far-off sofa 
 talking to an old friend. "He doesn't love her," 
 she consoled herself. "They have known one 
 another so long." Exhausted, she tore herself from 
 the agony and ecstasy of his presence, and leaning 
 back in her motor she said, "After all we were per- 
 fectly happy together. He never would have talked
 
 152 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 like that about his father if he hadn't loved me a 
 little," she added, trying to be impartial. 
 
 She reached her bedroom and turned on the electric 
 light. Vivisectionist, cold, fishlike daylight was forc- 
 ing its way relentlessly through chinks in the cur- 
 tains. The rosy shades of her lamps couldn't drive 
 it away. She shivered. Her ball dress lay on the 
 chair like a dead bird. Her satin shoes were frayed 
 and dirty, the camellia, limp and brown, lay among 
 a sprawling mass of hair pins. 
 
 The grey dispassionate eyes of dawn ruthlessly 
 examined the debris of her ecstasy. 
 
 She turned off the light and huddled into bed. 
 
 "He talked to such dull women. After all you 
 keep away from the people you really love at a 
 ball. You want your secret to be inviolate and you 
 don't want to make your beloved conspicuous." 
 
 She thought of the old friend she had left him 
 talking to "such an old friend," she murmured, to 
 reassure herself. 
 
 She remembered the things he had said about his 
 father. She remembered that he had told her that 
 she had a whimsical smile to this treasure she clung 
 and slowly it began to make her feel happier. "A 
 whimsical smile," she smiled to herself, and apply- 
 ing the balm to all the sore places of her conscious- 
 ness, she fell asleep.
 
 XVI 
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 1 
 
 FROM HER TO HIM 
 
 12 p. m. October 25th. 
 
 PARTIR c'est toujours mourir un peu. As your 
 train left the station I felt that it was taking 
 away not only you but whole bits of me bits of 
 my heart and my soul and certain special smiles and 
 laughs. My voice doesn't sound the same. All of 
 its low velvety whispering quality has gone. I don't 
 like hearing it it is like an empty box or an uncut 
 book. 
 
 I went home so wearily, feeling that my limbs 
 were merely weights which I had to carry, not as I 
 do with you that my body is the covering of a cur- 
 rent, a sheath into which I have put my spirit. 
 
 At dinner I wore my yellow dress that you don't 
 like, and I pulled my hair back from my forehead 
 viciously. I looked a fright. 
 
 Count G sat next to me. "You are wonder- 
 ful," he said. "You have abandoned easy loveli- 
 
 153
 
 154 ! HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 ness for the mystery and perfection of a Chinese 
 masterpiece." 
 
 I could have hit him. Several people came up 
 later and told me that I was strangely beautiful. 
 
 V asked me to let him paint me. I hated it. 
 
 It made me feel as if I were committing an infidelity. 
 To-morrow I will do my hair untidily and becom- 
 ingly. I will wear all the dresses you love and no 
 one will notice them, because I have worn them so 
 often. 
 
 God bless you. 
 
 E. 
 
 II A. M., October 26th. 
 
 It is such a lovely day. A real October day, shot 
 with red gold-dust, a stillness so absolute that the 
 leaves look painted on air. 
 
 I wish it were grey and cold and windy I 
 
 feel very unshot with gold myself- My grapevine 
 of bubbles has become a mere refuse of soap on the 
 surface of the water. How nasty it sounds ! What 
 I mean is that there are twelve hours of the day 
 still to be lived through before I can begin sleep- 
 ing and dreaming again and that during those 
 twelve hours I shall have to dress and put hair pins 
 in my hair and tell the motor where to go to and 
 talk and listen and laugh and behave as if I were
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 1^5 
 
 alive. And there won't be any plans only engage- 
 ments and there won't be any clothes only cloth- 
 ing and everyone will say the same thing in the 
 same voice. 
 
 And you will be in the train reading and dozing 
 and looking very warily before you leap into con- 
 versation with a casual stranger. Do you remember 
 how cross you were when I had that long, intoxi- 
 cating talk with that stray Armenian*? 
 
 I promise you that the scum of the earth wouldn't 
 tempt me to-day if you were here. What more can 
 I say? 
 
 Are you thinking of me at this very moment? 
 Are you writing to me? I feel that there are no 
 unsent letters in your life. Is that unkind? 
 God bless you. 
 
 E. 
 
 2 A. M., October 26th. 
 
 It is of course October the 27th, but I don't feel 
 as if it were. The day, I need hardly say, was 
 fifteen hours long, and the hoars were longer than 
 anything you could imagine. The clock never 
 seemed to strike, no one ever seemed to leave, every- 
 thing resolutely refused to come to an end. 
 
 At dinner I put on the most wonderful gramo-
 
 156 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 phone record of myself it seemed the only thing 
 to do and afterward I played bridge. I tried to 
 feel that I was God battling with Providence, and 
 that the green baize table was staging life in minia- 
 ture (that is what you ought to feel when you are 
 gambling), but I couldn't feel anything except that 
 I was holding a lot of absurd dead bits of cardboard 
 in my hand, and that I was apparently winning 
 money perfectly automatically at a tremendous rate. 
 
 When I came to bed I was as tired as one only is 
 when the surface of one's mind has been working 
 perfectly without being fed by real attention and 
 interest. 
 
 Have you arrived? Are you in bed asleep or sub- 
 consciously wondering why the telephone doesn't 
 ring and a whispering voice like the rustle of a cur- 
 tain isn't saying "Good-night God bless you, 
 always," which of course it is. 
 
 E. 
 
 4 
 
 FROM HIM TO HER 
 
 October JOfh. 
 
 I was so glad to get your excellent letter. The 
 journey was incredibly cold and the light went out 
 every time the train slowed down. I tried to read 
 a pamphlet on plebiscites, but soon gave it up in
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 157 
 
 favour of a detective novel, and then sleep. The 
 train was a patchwork of nationalities, but I fared 
 fairly well with an Italian Major in my compart- 
 ment. / with whom I could practise my Italian. You 
 would have been perfectly happy picking up unde- 
 sirable acquaintances, but as you know, I haven't 
 your gifts. I found a lot of things waiting for me 
 here. My agent had come down from Scotland and 
 we had to go into all sorts of estimates and things. 
 I should have liked your advice. 
 
 I met your friend H in the street. He said 
 
 he had rather gathered you were not very well, but 
 I told him that was not the case. He then asked 
 me if you were happy, which seemed to me odd 
 not to say impertinent. I can't think what you see 
 in him. To me he is like a hysterical woman. 
 
 Take care of yourself. Bless you. 
 
 M. 
 
 5 
 
 FROM HER TO HIM 
 
 October 2()tJi. 
 
 I haven't had a line from you not even a wire. 
 I don't know whether you are dead or alive or 
 rather I do know, as presumably I should have heard 
 if you were dead. Why don't people take the
 
 158 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is 
 so much more important The whole system is 
 wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I 
 have ever longed for in life pour in. Everyone 
 says all of the nice things that I would so have 
 loved to have repeated to me ; my enemies and even 
 my friends forgive me, charitable memories collect 
 everything that is charming and overlook everything 
 that is not and why? Simply because I am no 
 longer there to be made happy. 
 
 Meanwhile here I am without a snowdrop or a 
 letter, trying to remember nice things that you said 
 to me months ago, and succeeding in remembering 
 nasty things you said to me weeks or even days ago. 
 In fact I am cold and depressed and cross and disap- 
 pointed and ungrateful. 
 
 Also I am in the state when I can't help talking 
 about you not necessarily to say important things 
 in fact of course, I have nothing to say about you 
 but because I like having your name on my lips, 
 because I like hearing it on other people's. 
 
 Promise not to write me the "Where-is-it-all-to- 
 end" sort of letter, or the certificate kind: "You 
 don't know what our intimacy has meant to me." 
 I know the "J" would be the end of everything 
 or rather the end of me and the beginning of some- 
 one else. My dear one, I am not abusing you for 
 not writing don't imagine that and I don't mind
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 what you say when you do (that is probably not 
 true). I only want to see your beloved writing to 
 know you were thinking of me ; to know that you are 
 alive and well and even happy. 
 You see well, God bless you. 
 
 E. 
 
 FROM H. TO E. 
 
 November 3rd. 
 Beloved Lisa : 
 
 I met your friend M in the street. Must you love 
 him? Do you love him*? Am I being impertinent*? 
 Must you like him? Do you like him? Am I being 
 silly? I foolishly stumbled into sincerity he was 
 very chilly. I called you "Lisa" and he called you 
 "Lady Raeburn." I told him you weren't well, 
 which was idiotic of me as he naturally must have 
 known whether it was true or not (are you well?), 
 and I asked him if you were happy. I know it was 
 outrageous but there was something about his spats 
 that got my nerves. Lisa, can you bear his spats? 
 Think how you hate spats or won't even that do any 
 good? 
 
 I wish you weren't as wretched as I know you are. 
 Lisa, darling blessed, there is never anything I can 
 do, is there? jj.
 
 l6o I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 FROM HIM TO HER 
 
 November 5th. 
 
 What a wonderful correspondent you are, with 
 your unerring sense of the right word and the most 
 expressive phrase. Thank you for your letters. It 
 is always good to hear from you. 
 
 London is very foggy and cold. I have just been 
 north and tried to settle things up. Do you remem- 
 ber talking to me about a young MacDonald? 
 Would he be any use as an agent*? I would be very 
 glad of your opinion, and also of his address. My 
 plans are unsettled and the F. O. seems in no hurry. 
 Here everything is very gloomy and the industrial 
 situation looks blacker every day. I met your friend 
 
 S the other day. He has been making a series 
 
 of the most mischievous speeches, and I would have 
 preferred not to shake hands with him. However, 
 out of deference to you I did, but when he called you 
 by your Christian name I would have liked to have 
 kicked him. Charity and curiosity seem to me to 
 lead you, if not astray, at any rate in very queer 
 directions sometimes. 
 
 Don't think I am being censorious. You are you. 
 Bless you. 
 
 M.
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE l6l 
 
 8 
 
 FROM HER TO HIM 
 
 November 2nd. 
 
 I have just had a letter from you, at last. Such 
 a characteristic, impersonal, discreet letter. From 
 where do you get your almost legal sense of the po- 
 tential possibilities of the written word? All the 
 same, I love hearing from you because I think, 
 "What does it matter what he writes? At each 
 word he is thinking of me, so one word is the same 
 as another." I'd love to have given your agent my 
 advice and he would have loved getting it. In fact 
 I should have been invaluable. Can't I send you an 
 agricultural opinion by post? 
 
 Dear one, I'm teasing you. I love you to ask me 
 what I think about anything always. 
 
 I'm sorry you don't like H. I knew you never 
 would. He is perhaps a little over-anxious to think 
 that one is in a draught in life, I mean but it is a 
 delicious fault. All of the little chinks in my time, 
 that were kept so carefully and lovingly and 
 religiously for a possible you, are now filled in. In 
 fact, hope has been taken out of my days and they 
 are very full.
 
 l62 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 Remember that a letter from you is the only 
 thing in life that can happen to me. 
 God bless you. 
 
 E. 
 
 E. TO H. 
 
 November 6th. 
 
 There are so many things you can do for me. 
 To begin with you can be alive, which makes me 
 happier every time I think of it. And then you 
 can always make me laugh which is the most divine 
 of all gifts Then, too, you love me a little, which 
 is a very great and undeserved joy to me. And of 
 course you are the best friend in the world. 
 
 Do you think you could ever bring yourself to 
 
 like M ? It would be delightful for me if you 
 
 could but don't try if the effort is to be too great. 
 It is true he does wear spats and I still don't like 
 them. 
 
 Yes, I am afraid I must love him. It is as you 
 surmise, incredibly inconvenient. Still, I am only 
 wretched in proportion to my happiness, so you 
 mustn't be sorry for me any more. But you must 
 please still be fond of me. 
 
 Lisa,
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 163 
 
 10 
 FROM HER TO HIM 
 
 November fth. 
 
 Another letter from you! Almost not quite 
 a love letter. "You are you." My dear, what a 
 confession in print ! How indiscreet you are becom- 
 ing. You really must be more careful. 
 
 So "curious and charitable" are your recipe for 
 me or rather for my habit of making undesirable 
 friends. Curious I certainly am. Charitable, per- 
 haps. I wonder. Or tolerant, or understanding*? 
 Intellectually interested and morally lazy is prob- 
 ably the right definition. The thought of charity 
 in connection with S. makes me smile. Even I with 
 my passionate belief that the great successes are 
 usually the real incompris have never made that 
 claim for him. Why he isn't even lonely surely 
 an unpardonable omission in a crusader; and he is 
 that, though you prefer to think of him as an agi- 
 tator which of course he is too. So are we all, if 
 we believe enough in our ideas or have any ideas 
 to believe in. 
 
 This is not an attack on the other ideal of life 
 yours even sometimes mine. I know that public 
 service is a wonderful thing, that the civil service 
 is the epic of England, our only just claim to our
 
 164 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 Empire. No other country in the world has its 
 cream so proud to be cast for invisible roles. I think 
 my nationalism is based on wonder and gratitude 
 for that. Also, I am mixing my metaphors and 
 writing a treatise. Worse than that, I am defending 
 your own case to you, when I had meant to write 
 an eloquent plea for the picturesque. 
 
 But to return to S. He is absolutely sincere and 
 absolutely disinterested both things you love. Do 
 open the windows at the back of your mind and 
 give the view your careful and loving consideration. 
 There are so many roads without avenues or lodge 
 gates or even sign posts. S. will always go across 
 country and I asked him to call me by my Chris- 
 tian name. I was dreadfully afraid he might refuse, 
 but he didn't. 
 
 ShUl I write and tell him never to do it to you, 
 but to try and remember that you are the early 
 Nineteenth Century English gentleman, or would 
 it be easier for him if he tried to think of you as a 
 butler? 
 
 Oh, my dear, what a glorious day it will be when 
 you first like one of my odd friends ! As for yours, 
 I am never allowed to see them the females ones, 
 I mean. I should hate the sheltered life you like 
 for me if it didn't usually land us in a tete-a-tete. 
 So after all, I say "Long live your proscriptions"! 
 God bless you. E.
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 165 
 
 11 
 
 November Qth. 
 
 To-day is the Lord Mayor's show day, isn't it*? 
 What funny things calendars remember days by. 
 Some day I will write one of my own. 
 
 September joth. M said, "I hope your child will 
 be like you not quite so clever perhaps but with 
 all your exquisite tenderness." 
 
 October 3rd. M said, "However strained our re- 
 lations may be I can't help the delight I take in 
 being with you my joy in the light of your mind." 
 
 October 6th. M said, "If I take you to that res- 
 taurant you mustn't look all round you with your 
 whimsical smile." 
 
 October 8th. M said, "You would have been a 
 good soldier because you have imagination, humanity 
 and no sentimentalism." 
 
 October loth. M said, "I can't understand your 
 absence of discretion and caution, your impervious- 
 ness to what people think. I like hiding my treasuie. 
 You think that if a thing is good it doesn't matter 
 how many people see it I think your attitude makes 
 life very difficult." 
 
 That was a defeat. But I suppose my calendar 
 ought to have defeats registered too. 
 
 I wonder if I could remember 365 nice things that
 
 l66 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 you have said to me. I think that if you have said 
 them I could. Some night I will try and then when 
 I can't get beyond twenty-five I shall assume that I 
 have lost my memory. 
 
 Madame de S said you were charming and 
 
 that you ought to marry and I said "Yes," rather 
 vaguely, and then as women always do in those 
 circumstances that you were very difficile and 
 asked for so much by the "so much" of course they 
 mean themselves. I love hearing Phoebe say with a 
 little self-conscious smirk, "John asks for everything 
 in a woman," as if everything were eternally and 
 inevitably synonymous for Phoebe. I am so glad 
 that I recognise all the tricks of my trade in myself, 
 as I do get such fun out of following them in my 
 friends. 
 
 I oughtn't to write like this to you ought I? It 
 really is sad to think that through all your various 
 adventures you believed in women till you met 
 me and I am hardly even an adventure. It is 
 rather a pretty theme that it requires une honnete 
 femme to shatter your illusions. 
 
 I forgot to tell you that Mme. de S said that 
 
 women without temperament fell like ninepins 
 I see her point. If you regard yourself as a gift and 
 there is no physical indulgence concerned you can 
 entangle the whole thing in what is probably a ficti- 
 tious sort of nobility. I think I shall teach my chil-
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 167 
 
 dren to beware of the cult of generosity. It is a 
 dangerous thing. 
 
 God bless you. 
 
 E. 
 
 12 
 FROM HIM TO HER 
 
 November ptk. 
 
 Thank you for your admirable eulogy of the 
 civil service. "Invisible roles" is excellent though 
 we diplomats certainly get the best of it there. S. 
 may be everything that you say but what a pity that 
 ability and disinterestedness should serve such a 
 cause. I am still old-fashioned enough to think that 
 what you believe in is important. 
 
 Here it is cold and grey. The F. O. haven't 
 made up their mind where to send me, my agent's 
 reports are most discouraging and altogether I am 
 in the blues. All the accounts of you are dazzling 
 as always. I heard of a battle of wits between you 
 and Briand. How much you get out of life ! How 
 do you do it? I am getting very middle-aged. What 
 a vitalizer you are. I wish I could go round and 
 be stimulated by you. 
 
 Bless you. 
 
 M.
 
 l68 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 13 
 FROM HER TO HIM 
 
 November nth. 
 
 I have just had your dear letter saying that you 
 wished you could come round and see me. Imagine 
 what I feel about it ! Why are you depressed dearest 
 and best? What can I do for you? Give your 
 agent advice"? I very nearly got into the train and 
 went to you- I wonder what deterred me? Could 
 it have been the Channel? That really would have 
 been to allow my sea-sickness too much importance. 
 Could it have been the almost insuperable difficulties 
 of producing an excuse for suddenly rushing over to 
 London? Could it have been a slight lurking fear 
 that your mood might have changed by the time I 
 arrived? I don't think it could have been that. You 
 know how ridiculously disproportionately I always 
 believe in your wanting to see me. 
 
 At any rate, remembering that in your view cow- 
 ardice is the better part of recklessness, here I am 
 leading what you so civilly describe as a dazzling 
 life. Isn't success a strange thing, always rushing at 
 you in the wrong shape at the wrong time? Mine 
 has always come to me on the highways when I have
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 169 
 
 wanted it on the byways. I wish you were here. I 
 wish I were there. I wish we were anywhere. 
 Bless you, 
 
 E. 
 
 14 
 
 FROM HIM TO HER 
 
 November 
 
 I have had two letters from you one with your 
 calendar and a characteristic attack on your own sex 
 and the other running down your own success. 
 What you seem to forget is that with you by-ways 
 inevitably become highways. You take the most 
 obscure looking lane and no sooner do you set foot 
 on it than you transform it into the main road. How 
 you manage your life at all I don't know, with 
 searchlights turned on to you from all sides and an 
 incurable tendency to behave as if you were in the 
 dark. But there you are, in spite of it all, with more 
 friends than anyone. 
 
 I suppose I must content myself with the formula 
 that with your outrageous vanity you insist on re- 
 garding as a compliment. You are you. 
 Bless you, 
 
 M.
 
 17O I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 15 
 
 FROM HER TO HIM 
 
 November l6th. 
 
 The most wonderful thing has happened. Can 
 you guess what it is? How long can I go on writing 
 without telling you? For pages and pages I hope. 
 Your last letter was delightful almost, if I dare 
 suggest it, uncharacteristically so, by which of 
 course I mean that your letters in a book of memoirs 
 would not be considered enchanting. I think that 
 everyone would say, "How curious that she 
 should have loved him so much when he obvi- 
 ously didn't care for her. And what a stiff stilted 
 man." Whereas I know that it is not in the least 
 curious that I should love you as much as I do and 
 that, in an odd unsatisfactory adorable way of which 
 you are sometimes and I am always conscious, 
 you do care for me. How could they know that 
 your letters are really love letters? That when you 
 tell me about your agent you are saying "I love 
 you," and that when you are talking about S's per- 
 nicious speeches it is equivalent to a "my own 
 precious darling." I emphasise the 'own' because it 
 is, I think, the S. complex. Aren't I vain to-day? 
 Vainer almost than ever before. That is because I
 
 FRAGMENT OF A CORRESPONDENCE 1JI 
 
 am happy singingly, dancingly happy. Happy 
 with all the glorious moments that are coming to me 
 and that being in my mind are already here. The 
 fact is no, I don't want to tell you just yet. The 
 Ambassador praised you tremendously to me last 
 night. I was silent with pleasure and then feeling 
 that something was expected of me I said "He is a 
 very old friend of mine," which is not, I suppose, 
 quite accurate, as we have only known one another 
 for nine months. But it is true all the same and 
 why should I conceal the real truth from the Ambas- 
 sador? He then said that you ought to marry, which 
 is always a tactless thing to say about an unmarried 
 man to any married woman. I was disgusted but I 
 let him go on talking about "nice" girls (whatever 
 that may mean!) until we were interrupted. He 
 then went away with a triumphant expression, no 
 doubt saying to himself "I have taken the bull by 
 the horns," which I daresay he did, but the bull 
 is still in the same place. 
 
 I can't go on any longer; I must tell you. I am 
 coming to London for a whole week ! Think of it 
 on the days when I positively must do things you will 
 be the cement and on the days when I only ought 
 to be doing things you will be the bricks, and all 
 the time there will be odd moments which will be 
 ours, yours and mine, and long hours and unex- 
 pected times And I am coming alone I
 
 172 I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME 
 
 shall be able to ring you up at night and whisper 
 "God bless you." 
 
 Everyday and all day I plan my week and fill 
 it fuller and fuller of you and already almost I 
 am beginning to cry at the thought that it will 
 come to an end. Oh, my dearest, I am glad I am 
 alive. 
 
 Bless you, 
 E. 
 
 TELEGRAM FROM HIM TO HER. 
 
 Please wire what train you come by. 
 
 M. 
 
 TELEGRAM FROM HER TO HIM. 
 
 Arrive Friday 7 150. 
 
 Blessings, 
 
 E. 
 
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